Spring Refresh Arrives
Jun 4th, 07 | Comments are closed.Ok all, I apologize for the lack of posts recently, but I’ve been a busy girl. I picked up a new client and was deep in the midst of the realign as well. It has left little time for blogging.
Anyway, you may remember a few weeks ago I talked about making some much-needed adjustments to Design Adaptations, and refitting content that didn’t seem to have a home. What started as an intent to realign, ended as a complete refresh. Here now, as you see it, is the realign/redesign I’ve dubbed Spring Refresh (yeah, I know it’s closer to summer now).
Drawing on observations from a few blogs I admire, and starting with a stripped down version of the Wordpress default theme (a.k.a. one of my base themes), I’ve incorporated organizational ideas from Daily Blog Tips, a bit of functionality from Cutline, and some design inspiration from Veerle’s blog. I’m pleased with the results, and I hope will be too. :)
Though it’s not exactly done, I felt it was close enough to launch. There are some XTML validity issues resulting from a couple plugins I use, and the search function doesn’t seem to be working properly, so I still have a bit of examining and tweaking to do. Ah well, a website is never done right?
I’d appreciate any feedback or [constructive] criticism. I hope to improve DA with every refresh, and your thoughts as readers would be incredibly helpful in meeting that goal. I’m also tossing around the idea of releasing it as a theme - if there’s any interest there let me know!
I really like it. Well done Charity! :)
It’s cleaner, with nice touches of detail. I can see the Veerle influence, but without it being blatent… ;)
Content’s definitely more accessible - and I like the way you’ve worked the missed articles into the main bar.
Jun 5, 07 | 6:49 amHi Charity,
It looks like it will be much easier to find posts now - nicer organisation, I like it. I am trying to revamp a theme myself bu its not going too well so far :)
Jun 5, 07 | 6:54 amThanks guys! Glad you approve. ;) Paul - you know how I feel about Veerle’s style! Tara - what kind of trouble are you running into? Maybe I could offer some help. I’m sure you know another set of eyes does wonders. I was on the phone or messenger quite a bit with another desiger friend while working on this refresh, and with her help a lot more color got worked in than probably would have.
Jun 5, 07 | 7:44 amHi Charity
Thanks for offer of help. Its really my lack of CSS thats the problem. I am trying to adapt a theme but little things i just can’t work out how to do, especially when it incorporates PHP. I am sure I will get there eventually, at least I am learning all the time. On ething you could help me with is when you are trying to style something that is input by PHP where do you put the styling class etc, within the PHP or tags before the PHP (does that make sense)? Thanks
Jun 5, 07 | 7:49 amTara - I know what you mean about struggling with the PHP aspects of theming. I still trip through it myself sometimes. As for the styling of PHP tags, (typically) your CSS would be on the outside, in form of XHTML. I’m probably not saying that right, but for example if you wanted to style your comment metadata (which I still need to do for this theme), then you could do so like this:
< small class="commentmetadata" >
< a href="#comment-” >
< ? php comment_date('F jS, Y') ?> | < ? php comment_time() ?>< /a >
< ? php edit_comment_link('Moderate','',''); ?>
< /small >
The PHP template tags are enclosed in the < small > XHTML tag, with a class attached. Alternatively you could use a span or div tag.
If you ever want to talk real time, I’m on Yahoo Messenger and/or Skype as feistyred04. Give me a holler. :)
Jun 5, 07 | 8:07 amthanks Charity, I may catch you skype sometime.
Jun 5, 07 | 8:23 amI like it. It’s nice. I really like the small strip of colours bordering the top of the ‘bottom column’. A subtle thing, but nice.
One thing I’ve noticed is your logo and small text underneath it doesn’t align on the left with all the content below it. This may be intentional but it jars a little with me.
Jun 5, 07 | 1:59 pmFunny you should mention that Aaron - placement of the logo and “snapshot” text was intentional, but I’ve been going back and forth over it. I still have some fine-tuning to do, so I’ll have to give that some more thought and experiment a bit. Thanks, I appreciate your feedback. :)
Jun 5, 07 | 3:19 pm[...] ideas for a premium WordPress theme were forming back in June, when I launched the Spring Refresh theme on Design Adaptations. If you take a look you might notice a few similarities. ;) Then I saw [...]
Nov 23, 07 | 1:15 pm