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Requesting Input for a WordPress Theme

Web Design • July 6th, 2006

Not to discredit and harshly criticize any of the current themes available at Wordpress.com, but to tell the truth, several weeks ago Joey and I had the hardest time finding an adequate theme for Joey’s blog. What I mean by “adequate”:

1. Content is easy to read:
Colors, font sizes, page width and other design aspects make for a comfortable reading experience.

2. Design is nice and clean:
“Nice” is relative to every person, of course… But the set of themes whose designs were appealing to us was small. We found either too much of something, or too old-fashioned, or plain boring. Notice I’m not saying too bloggish. I don’t think that’s a bad thing per se, though a little personality is always nice.

3. Page layout is free of major bugs in several browsing environments:
This requirement was the killer for many nice designs. Cross-browser support includes Windows and Macintosh computers; Internet Explorer, Firefox, Safari, and maybe Opera browsers – if you want to be read in Europe.

I realize that there are a million free WP themes out there, and plenty of people who can develop a good blog theme. But now that several of my friends and family are blogging with the free version of WordPress, blog themes are becoming more personal to me, and after all I am a web designer, and if I may: a good one.

As this year’s pro bono project I’d like to create a free WordPress theme. If you are interested, and if you like my design style, I would love to hear what kinds of requests you have… What bugs you about your current theme? What would you love to have? What adjectives would describe your preferred look and feel (a few examples: clean, minimal, whimsical, powerful, intellectual, technical, artistic).

I may not be able to fulfill every single requirement, but starting with some user input is always the best first step to a successful product. If the end result is worthy, it may be available in WP.com one day. So, any takers… Please start the wish list, and please link to your blogs so I can see who you are and what you write about. That’s also very important.

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Posted: Thu, July 6th, 2006 at 3:06 pm
Filed under: English, Web Design, Design
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8 comments:

  1. On July 6th, 2006 at 3:40 pm, Danny wrote:

    The one on stuff is cool is too pink! No, not really, I actually kind of like the theme I got (cherry-berry-pr is the name of it) … at least, I like that it’s fairly readable and has a sensible layout. The pink bit is for Meg, of course.

  2. On July 6th, 2006 at 4:08 pm, Maria wrote:

    You say “at least”, and “kind of like”… Hmmm… Am I reading too much, or is there a little room for improvement there? What keeps you from “really liking” your theme Danny? What would make you switch if you found it somewhere else?

  3. On July 7th, 2006 at 6:11 am, Petie wrote:

    I like the simple look of ours, but the color scheme is gross. Lime green with blue? I’d also like it to have a more artistic air to it. Perhaps a graphic? Something a little unique to the boring “here is the blog” / “here are the links”.

    Chris may have some input on the bugs. I know that’s why we switched over to wordpress.

  4. On July 7th, 2006 at 7:08 am, Chris wrote:

    The bugs: the main problems we had were unrelated to templates. blogger would sometimes cut off the template halfway through when bringing it up to edit, so when I’d make an edit to the header and save, the bottom half would be gone forever. Then, whenever I would add some script sections it would show up in Firefox but not IE - again, blogger’s problem probably.

    A theme is subject to personal tastes (obviously) and things change when you see it laid out. For example, I thought the one template on wp.com that has two side columns would be too cluttered. Then I realized how much white space was wasted with the one column themes and it could be pulled off without too much clutter.

    I haven’t looked at a large number of them (wp themes). The thing I didn’t like about the Simpla 101 theme compared to the “minima” blogger theme was that simpla lacked structure - it just looked like a bunch of words on the page. “Minima” had subtle lines and different text sizes to give more structure and balance.

    I’m surprised wp or another site hasn’t come up with an easier way to customize free themes - seems like they could give some variables like # of columns, colors, pictures, font types/sizes and store those variables in a database to render the code. Maybe that’s a performance problem and maybe if people want that much customization they can host their own wp blog, huh?

    I’ll give it more thought and when you’re in Houston Petie and I can give our thoughts in person on some of the wp themes that are around - easier to point out likes/dislikes that way.

  5. On July 7th, 2006 at 8:32 am, Maria wrote:

    Great comments guys…

    I agree with Petie. A blog is a blog, and only a few layouts make sense for that kind of content. But anything you can do to give yours a little personality and make it “yours” will help differentiate it.

    Chris, some of the wp.com themes allow you to customize the header image (e.g. Regulus and the Kubrick default theme), via a bunch of JavaScript coded by the theme’s author. However you can’t edit the CSS which is where all the real power resides. I’m not sure either why WP.com doesn’t allow that one document to be editable.

    Blogger’s templates are nicer in terms of design and usability because they have been designed by some of the best web designers. In contrast, most of the themes available at WP.com strike me as created by developers. There’s no question that WordPress is a much superior product. That’s why I’d love to create a good theme by my standards and submit it to WP.com.

  6. On July 7th, 2006 at 11:14 pm, Joey wrote:

    OK, I’ll bite. Here is what I would do with mine:

    1. I like the tabs at the top, but I would make these my categories. No need to have categories on the side tool bar when you can just put it at the top.

    2. I’d make the font in my header a little bigger. It would be cool if people could adjust this.

    3. Load your own photo in the header!

    4. I don’t know. The colors are good in mine, but not perfect.

  7. On July 13th, 2006 at 3:50 pm, Blagoj wrote:

    Hi Maria and company,

    This is a perfect post for what I went thru in the last 3 months trying to setup a blog for myself. I looked everywhere as you guys did, searched to find a template that I would like so much that I will fall in love with :), but all were distant compared to the one I had designed in my head. So long story short… I sat down, learned CSS and designed my own template.

    p.s. I haven’t finished the site yet, that’s why I’m URLing you to the index.php

  8. On August 4th, 2006 at 10:00 am, Mafe Maria wrote:

    Custom Blog Design on WordPress.com…

    As if somebody had heard our desperate scream for CSS customization on WordPress.com blogs, a CSS Editor plugin has just been released. It allows you to modify the stylesheet of any WP.com theme, and upload any images you want to use with your CSS. Bot… Read full post »

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