Unveiling my new theme

Warning This article was written over six months ago, and may contain outdated information.

Anyone not reading this in an RSS feed will notice that I’ve installed a new theme. I was never really happy with the previous one, as it was based on a design that had been rejected from another project and was called into action before it was ready.

I’ve given this one a version number of 0.5, as I still have a lot I want to do with it, notably: embedding more microformats in the code; adding more progressive enhancement to the CSS; making more use of WordPress’ tagging system; and testing more thoroughly in IE.

However, I’m pretty pleased with the more typographic direction in this design, and am excited to be using a theme I genuinely care about.

If any readers have any constructive criticism to give, please go ahead and do so in the comments. However, do please be gentle with me!

6 comments on
“Unveiling my new theme”

  1. Nice design. I like it.

    The way the comment text fields are the same color as the background (white) is a little bit confusing at first, but once I looked at it for a moment I realized it gave it a nice effect. You might want to consider putting some example text in to make it more natural.

  2. Thanks Grant. That’s pretty much what I think of the text fields, too; I’ll have to think of a way to indicate more clearly that they are editable.

  3. Hi Peter,

    Looks very nice, although I do have a couple of suggestions.

    Personally, the light blue square in the top left looked like an image had failed to load and I actually refreshed the page just to check… maybe a logo or something on top of it would work well?

    Also, agree with the comment about the text fields. Maybe it’s Ok in this situation as I’m sure most people using your site are pretty web savvy, but I definitely would stay away from using this kind of method for a more commercial site where it could cause problems from a usability perspective.

    Personally, I’d probably block them in so they look more like a rectangle and maybe have some form of hover so that it’s a bit clearer that it’s clickable?

    Overall though it’s definitely an improvement :)

  4. Nice design – the only change I’d make is to push the main body copy size up a pixel. Also, having the logotype in sans-serif and the rest of the site in serif feels a little weird.

  5. Thanks for the comments, guys; very welcome, and I’ll take them on board.

  6. First off, nice job. Looks good.
    Some suggestions…
    Put Related links after at the end of the article.
    Why 2 fonts in the comment form?