So I’ve finally decided that I’m going to tackle the beast. That beast just so happens to be creating a WordPress theme and successfully getting it into the WordPress Theme Directory.
I have learned from prior experiences that that is no easy task, but I can also say that I’ve learned a lot since then and maybe this time around I will find more success.
Now, creating/editing WordPress themes is nothing new to me. I built the theme for my arena football website, Arena Pigskin, completely from the ground up and then rebuilt it using somewhat of the same format. Unfortunately, I didn’t do the same here, but this theme is a pretty nice theme on its own, so I didn’t need to do much anyway.
Anyway, I’ve title the theme I’m working on “Nuovo”, which is Italian for “new”, but that might change. It will be a responsive design, something that is all the rage in the web designer world these days and it will mean that users won’t have to install another theme or a plugin so that their sites look good on desktop, tablet and mobile devices. It will also come with theme options, something that really tripped up the theme directory goal last time around, and will allow users to customize the look of the design to their liking. It goes without saying that it will also support custom headers and custom backgrounds.
As for the look, so far I’m planning just a fairly basic design overall. Nothing will be over-the-top fancy. But what it’ll lack in design, it will make up for in complexity, usability and readability.
More than likely it’ll feature two navigation menus, one above and the other below the custom header/masthead. below that will be the featured category slider, which will rotate stories along with their featured photo as the user sees fit. Below that will be room for several posts in categories that the user will select and finally there probably will be between five to ten posts that aren’t already on the homepage. There will be a sidebar and minimal footer.
The other pages at this point will be fairly simple and I don’t think it’ll get that complicated. So this ought to be interesting.
I’m first planning to test a jQuery plugin that I’m using for the mobile side of themes on the mobile site for Arena Pigskin, which will hopefully make me feel better about using it for this theme.
This is going to be a lot of fun and hopefully it’ll all turn out great in the end. I will keep posting about how my progress is going, hopefully once a week.
