Variations on a WordPress theme
After working through a tutorial on building WordPress themes by wpdesigner.com, I had a basic, functional — and clunky looking — theme for my site. It had all the elements that I now understand to be the WordPress basics — a header, a content well for posts, a sidebar for links, pages and archives, plus a footer.
Everything worked, but it had no style.
Of course, the reason I set out to build a theme from scratch was to make something unique. I’ve been impressed, for example, at what the author of FlowingData has achieved using WordPress. And I like a good challenge.
So, I’ve spent the last few days digging into my CSS. I’ve used style sheets at work for internal projects I code in Visual Studio, so I have a head start. A reference CSS tutorial is handy for defining various elements, but I probably am learning the most by studying (and borrowing from) a couple of themes I’ve admired: Hemingway and Monochrome Lite.
If you know the Hemingway theme well, you’ll recognize shades of it in my current header, which closely resembles the Hemingway header. I added a horizontal navigation bar that separates the top from the content to come. I’ve yet to style the content well, but I did decide to create left, middle and right divs for blocks of content. More to come — and I definitely will have to ask for help with colors. It’s what I know the least about.
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