Extra! Extra! Check Out The New Theme!
Nov 1So after more time than I’d like to admit, I’ve finally finished enough of my theme to put it on goingthewongway! I’m excited that I’ve changed it. Check it out and let me know what you think!
And now I present to you: Soi-disant
I’ve only changed my theme once to (Not So) Fresh as I posted in New Look. That was 8 months ago and since then quite a bit has changed.
Why I wanted to make my own theme
Have a unique look to my blog
I’ve come across other blogs that had the same theme, and that wasn’t too exciting for me. I want and like to be my own. So even though the last one did look nice, it was unfortunate because other people thought that it looked nice as well.
Learn much, much more web design
CSS in particular, HTML and PHP to a lesser degree since I already knew a fair amount before doing the theme. Part of who I am wants to understand how things work and why. So learning new things can be very exciting to me. Not to mention the fact that it’s very pertinent to my profession of computer programming. (Although I must admit that I believe that I lack the creativity necessary to actually ever become a web designer. I know the nuts and bolts but lack the vision. :P)
Create a fluid display
I wanted one that would show up well on the very popular 1024x768 and 1280x1024 screen resolutions in addition to any other screen resolutions. I’m sorry to say that it’s very likely that anything below 1024x768 won’t look all that great. A fluid display means that the text and page elements will expand according to how much space is available. My previous theme was fixed width so it didn’t look too great to me on higher resolution displays.
Speed things up
The last theme used a fair amount of images to create all of the nice effects. And that’s nice for people on fast connections (which at this point is a very fair amount of people). However there still are people on slower connections, and I want my blog to be accessible to them as well, too.
Soi-disant
I got the name of this theme (Soi-disant) by looking up a word of the day online. Lame, huh? I thought it was cool because it means calling oneself thus, self-styled, or so-called. Seemed interesting to me so there it is.
So I did it all for this theme: header logo, PHP code, HTML, CSS. It was a learning experience, that is for sure.
Wordpress theme designer: check