Picking a Blog Theme
Why is it so hard for me to pick a theme for my WordPress blog? I have probably spent quite a few hours this past week, just staring at the huge variety of themes out there. I had been using the Barecity theme for some time now. Its absolutely clean, lets you concentrate on content, and has no distractions. Adding thumbnails of my Flickr images did provide some needed color. Eventually it just seemed bland.
I started thinking about what I was looking for in a theme:
- Clean (not cluttered at least)
- Minimal graphics
- Some color, preferably bright (but nothing crazy)
- Easy to modify
Now, that is a whole lot to ask for, but I figured I would hopefully find a couple that would interest me. So I just started looking around.
The WordPress Theme Viewer is one of the best resources around. I downloaded a few and tried them out. Having done some minor CSS and Javascript work a while ago for my day job, I quickly remembered why I could never make it as a web designer. CSS is its own beast and trying to modify someone else’s stylesheets to work in Firefox, IE6/7, and Opera, is time consuming and practically impossible. Granted, there are probably better tools than the “Edit CSS” tool in the Firefox Web Developer add-on, but I wasn’t looking to spend that much time on it.
To make a long story short, I eventually settled on what you see here. If the theme seems familiar, its the theme used at Blogging Pro. I like the blue and orange colors and didn’t have to make a whole lot of changes besides moving around some content on the sidebars.
Then I moved on to getting my tumblelog to match my blog somewhat. If you haven’t heard of tumblelogs, its just a way of aggregating things that you find interesting. So if you have lots of different accounts at sites like del.icio.us, flickr, Google Reader, etc, its an interesting way of letting others know what caught your attention. There are plenty of sites that do this, I’ve been using tumblr.
We’ll see how long I stick with this theme before I get tired of it and start searching again.
Yeah, I have a really hard time finding wordpress themes that are attractive and work well. The one I’m using now seems okay but widgets and things are not as customizable as I’d like. I think it would be cool if someone did a really nice ubuntu-ish wordpress theme that was customizable.
Modifying somebody else’s CSS is a pain the butt, I know. That’s why I recommend using the Sandbox theme and coding up some simple CSS for it.
I find that it’s better to spend a few hours coding up an OK-looking theme for Sandbox that looks exactly the way I want it, than spend several hours/days hacking somebody else’s theme and not getting the right result.
Themes on the WP Theme Viewer might look nice, but they are very ugly inside, and are often not much more than severely hacked-up Kubricks that would not validate if the DOCTYPE were XHTML 1.0 Strict (as opposed to Transitional).
Oh gosh, I know. I feel lame for still using the default theme, but it’s simple and clean, and until I have time to find something cool enough to replace it, that’s what I’ll use. Good theme choice though
@Jeremy
Using the Sandbox theme as a starting point is a good idea. Isn’t that what Sandbox is for?
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