This is the creative outlet of Leslie Franke. Welcome to my online portfolio and digital playground.
Shades of Gray is not a theme for Wordpress itself, but a skin for the Wordpress Sandbox theme. Shades of Gray is a minimalist, two column fluid-width theme. It is primarily a grayscale skin but could easily be modified to use whatever colors you desired. If you would like to play around with the skin in the wild feel free to download it and give it a try.
One of the most interesting themes for Wordpress is the Sandbox theme. Sandbox is different than most Wordpress themes due to its semantic markup and dynamic class-generating functions. The authors of the theme have leveraged Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) to allow for the styling of almost anything on the page without having to touch any PHP code. Nearly every HTML element has an assigned class. For example, multiple classes are assigned to the body and to every post. This allows designers to change the look and feel of Sandbox by creating different skins (CSS files) which are then applied to the theme.
After finding some Wordpress themes for inspiration I set about creating the look and feel of my new site. As different developers will take different approaches to designing a site layout there are several ways to go about doing this. I believe that a solid theme will always start with well coded HTML. As a result, the very first thing is to create a homepage with no dynamic data, just a plain HTML page with code for the layout and dummy text as content. Then the look and feel can be applied to the site with CSS files, colors, and images being plugged into the static page.
The rational behind completing the site design/coding and layout first is to make sure that all of the code blocks are in the right place and semantically laid out. In addition, this is a good time to validate the site, checking for errors like an improperly closed div tag that could mess up the site layout. Once the layout code has been added to the Wordpress template, errors of this kind are much more difficult to diagnose and fix. This approach provides a chance to nail down the styles that will be used for layout and text without having to worry about any Wordpress tags or PHP code getting it the way.
Fundamentally there are a couple of ways to go about creating a Wordpress theme. One way is to adapt another theme to meet your needs or alternatively to create a new theme from scratch. My initial thinking was that I was going to end up designing the theme from scratch but having no real previous experience with designing Wordpress themes and being far from a PHP wizard I began looking for a Wordpress theme that I could use as a basis for the site redesign. I took the approach of looking for a theme that matched the general layout I wanted for my site, colors and images were not that important as they could easily be changed later.
The first place I visited was the WordPress theme viewer. Thankfully, I could use the site’s filtering capabilities to look at only 2 column, liquid layout (most themes have a fixed width), widget-ready themes. Not finding a theme there that met all of my needs I decided to search Google using terms like “best wordpress themes” and came up with a few more potential candidates. Eventually I came up with the K2 theme (lot of code to learn from but not the type of layout I wanted) plus a list of seven other themes that could be considered potential candidates to use as a starting point.
Recently I undertook the task of redesigning this site with the intention of using WordPress as a content management system (CMS) to not only manage my blog but to also manage the site’s static pages. My goal was to create a site that was clean, liquid, and uncluttered while adding a little bit more of color and spice than existed in this site’s previous incarnation. Additionally, I wanted a design that was not your traditional two-column fixed width blog like theme. I decided to continue using Wordpress as it can easily be tweaked to meet my requirements and a large amount of Wordpress documentation is available that I could utilize when needed.
Before beginning the design and development of my new theme I set up a local Wordpress installation using the latest version of Wordpress. This would allow me to easily test the new site design and layout. There are a multitude of different ways to do this but one of the easiest ways to I have found is to download and run XAMPP Lite from either your hard drive or a jump drive (instructions on how to do this can be found here).
