Workin’ on it… it’s kinda done.
Yes, today is my designated day of creating my own wordpress template. So if the site seems a bit wonky to you, I appologize. At least you’re seeing this message which means that I haven’t screwed up too badly. It will be done, even if its the last thing I do (today).
So it took longer than what I had originally estimated but the website is in a somewhat usable state. If you do ever think about creating your own wordpress template here are a few thoughts that I’d like to leave you with in the hopes of preparing you better when creating your own template.
Learn wordpress. Specifically, learn how to manipulate the wordpress templates and tags. Coming from blogger (blogger is damn easy) and being a somewhat competent web developer, I thought it was going to be a relatively simple task to create a template from scratch. Of course, “relatively simple” turned into “harder than quantum mechanics” after the 6th hour of figuring out why my blog posts weren’t showing up. I think I might’ve lost some hair. Here are a few invaluable links that helped me out:
- Designing a wordpress template: The basics
- Designing a wordpress template: The sidebar and more
- Designing a wordpress template: The content
- Stepping into wordpress templates
Mockups, make lots of them. The main page, the post page, the post page with the list of comments and the comment form, the post page without any comments and the comment form, a post page with comments that has comments turned off, a post page without comments and the comments form turned off, the archive page, the about page … etc. Yes, making 1 mock up (the main page) isn’t enough. Especially when you’re at your 6th hour of coding and you realize that people can’t comment on any post because you don’t have a comment form.
Make the CSS and XHTML first. This was probably the one thing that I did right. After I did my mockup in fireworks, I created my CSS style rules along with my XHTML markup. By doing this, I knew exactly how my markup was going to look like and it was a simple matter of finding a way to import in my css style rules correctly.
Overall, I’m satisfied with the way the site turned out. I’m still missing a few tweeks to the template but those things can hold off for now. I’m a big fan of the “phased release approach” aka. procrastination.
12:58 pm
Comments on this post
I like the site a lot. Very clean. I also like the unique way of displaying the date. I was thinking of starting a wordpress blog but thats where my procastination began.
clean, beautiful site ritchie! now if only i could get *you* to do my new site, i could skip the heartache.
aww, thanks guys. it means a lot that people are actually diggin’ the look of the site. i’ve gotten a good amount of feedback from people. mostly around the color scheme that doesn’t involve grey as the foundation. for a while there i think people might’ve thought i was color blind
i don’t mind helping you out col, just let me know when and where. you know how it goes.
Very nicely done. And so clean!
I feel absoluely lazy to make my own WP template. So I salute you. :p
congratulations! i’m sure you’ll find new ways to update this one. it is much prettier, i must admit.
I’ve always been an advocate of minimalist designs. cool.