Making it Yours – An Inept Guide to Website Design

And when I say ‘design’, of course, I mean theft.

Regulars will have noted that things don’t stand still for too long here on twopointouch. Apart from the post count. Fiddling with new themes and plugins is almost compulsive behaviour. While I’ve only had around four long-term favourite themes over the last five years, there’s every chance that you’ll have dropped in at some point when I’ve been doing something totally different – for about five minutes.

This continual urge for dalliance when it comes to off-the-peg themes has now led me in a totally new direction. Actually making something for myself. It’s all a bit scary and random, but one of the things that I’ve learned is that there’s lots of info and tools to help you out.

This is how I started.

I like the functionality of the Hybrid theme for WordPress. It’s got tons of page templates, plugin-compatibility and SEO right out of the box. So let’s start there.

It’s built for designers, and one consequence of that is that it looks a bit drab when you use it ‘naked’. The author, Justin Tadlock, encourages people to develop child-themes. For a while, I used his Structure template, which I customised very slightly to allow for full posts on the home page and the spaceman picture that I stole from the wonderful artist Jeremy Geddes.

Then I managed to break that, while trying to upgrade something else. I know how I broke it, and I could go back. But the breakage made me feel that I ought to be doing something else. That I should be trying to make something of my own.

So I reinstalled Hybrid and created a child-theme. This means that it takes everything Hybrid has to offer, but then gives you a blank canvas at the same time. By a blank canvas, I mean a new CSS file that can override every element in the theme.

Looking around recently, I liked the look of a theme called Clean Simple White. Up to a point. I liked the clean and simple bit, but there seemed to be loads of lines all over the place (according to my simple aesthetic sensibilities). It also didn’t work with the pages I’d already made and I like serifs for body copy – sue me.

So, I thought, I could take some of that look and remake it with Hybrid. You have to learn a tiny bit of CSS (this site makes it really easy) and you really want the Firebug extension for Firefox for testing and stealing things. And then it’s just trial and error.

I’m quite pleased with the look so far, but it’s maybe a bit wide and I want my spaceman back – maybe as a sort of ghost image behind the header area. Let’s see how we go.

Possibly related:

• Free Guide to SEM
• Making is… Making?
• Making it big on Web 2.0