I’ve just spent a few hours re-designing the layout of Dawning.ca. The old one served me very well and I really liked it. I had heavily modified the previous theme to work for me and work it did. I may tap it some time in the future as a backup… As you can see to the right, the new style is fairly different compared to the image. Although I kept the workflow as I think it was already pretty good.
Objectives
Basically, I was trying to get the site to be:
- Simple to use
- Uncluttered
- Attractive
- Professional & Casual
- Technically Interesting
- Simple to use
- Did I mention, simple to use?
I feel I accomplished these goals. Though I felt I had to sacrifice some technically interesting features in order to reduce the clutter. I had made some cool logos awhile ago that looked good on the more cartoony past version of the site, but they looked horrible here. I ultimately decided to just get rid of the top banner all together, I don’t think people need to keep being reminded of what site they’re on. Anyway, comment below eh!?
Technical Blah
I’m using a few css tricks I’ve learned in the last while to round corners, shade and pretty things up. Mainly, for rounded corners I use tricks such as those found here.
In terms of the shading, if you carefully look at my setup, the black gradient on the red background is made from a 1 x 200 px png image file overlayed on a red background. CSS for that trick is that like this:
background-image: url('/media/bkgd.png');
background-repeat: repeat-x;
Most shaded regions are made using 10 x 10 px images repeated that are very transparent png images. I use css nearly identical to that above for this too, only difference is the repeat statement has no -x to it.
I built up the new theme using the very famous and helpful Atahualpa theme. I’ve used this theme for various WordPress websites of mine including those for:
Also, my buddy Devin who I recently helped get his first Apache/MySQL/PHP/WordPress server install going is using the Atahualpa Theme for his website, it truly is a great WordPress theme for both advanced and beginners alike.
Your Turn
What do you all think of my redesign? Any suggestions? What WordPress theme do you use?