I have to tell you, folks, after a few days of playing with themes for WordPress, I’m disappointed.
As developed, the theme we’re using here… Originally called “Boxy But Gold” (Details and contact links in the page footer) needed a little work to fit in with what we’re doing here at BitsBlog. In the end it was pretty much plug and play, and then a few weeks worth of tweaking. I was able to add the feed pages quickly, and the tabbing display at the top of the page under the header works better than I’d hoped.
What we ended up with is a theme that’s easy to read, even for those gifted with less than 20/20 vision, one that flows with graphics nicely… I love the way pictures get text wrapped in this theme… (took a little toying with the CSS, but we got it) It’s briht enough to attract attention to itself.. and despite being overloaded with scripts and such, it still loads in a reasonable amount of time.
And finally, I like the way this theme adapts to whatever screen it happens to be on… I can run the screen resolution all the way down to 640*480, and take it all the way out to 2560*1024… it doesn’t matter… the screen is still quite readable; element widths are set on percentage of the window, or of the elements they’re in as appropriate, not a hard set. The whole thing floats. That’s a real issue because most if not all the themes I’ve liked the look of, were hard set and won’t drop down. Nor do they expand to fill the screen on higher resolutions. Granted that most… a little under half are running 1024, as you see in this fruit pie graph that Sitemeter made up for me. the rest though, are running something a little odd, resolution-wise and I’d just as soon not lose that traffic.
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So why have I wanted to move off it it?
I dunno. Kinda like wanting to paint the room.. just a redecoration thing.
And for all the work I’ve put into this theme, it still has a few shortcomings.
For one thing, bullets (As in my Nightly Ramble) don’t space the way I’d like. I’d like each new point to have a paragraph line between them, and I don’t see a clear way to accomplish that, in this theme without a major re-write which will likely screw up a lot of other stuff.
Second, I see great things coming in the area of Sidebar Widgets, and this theme doesn’t seem to accommodate them all that well. Likely, this one is something stupid, but I haven’t found it yet.
I’d like to place a grahpic in the header under the blog name, instead of just the plain background. I’ve never seen a way to do that. I can insert the gfx ok, but the text wraps around it. I’d like to add different graphics to the herald lines as holidays and such roll around. Can’t do that with this right now.
Why do I got through all of this in this post? Well, it’s actually an apology. I’ve had the blog down and or squirrelly for the last few evenings, on and off, and all of the above is why.
Now you know.
What am I going to do? I dunno. Perhaps I’ll find someone better versed in dealing with WP themes, that’s willing to help. Maybe I’ll just suck it up and continue with this one, I don’t know.