Wordpress Theme for Designers
January 02, 2008
I’ve just recently had to convert an existing website into a Wordpress site for a client. The good news was that on the whole, they wanted their existing site design to stay as close as possible while giving them the ability to add news, images and videos to their website without destroying the look and feel of the website. Thankfully, with the old design in place (albeit using tables for layout) I saved hours of creative and design time. Here’s the original and the overhaul I did. I cut down the page size by 50% and reduced the size of images and calls to the server by 50% as well. And I was finished in about 6 hours.
My theme development for clients used to be a pretty exhaustive process. For each project I’d start with a fresh install of Wordpress and hack up a theme’s PHP pages till it was tailored to fit. I’d go in and add classes and id’s on-the-fly during my CSS development. Adding and updating id’s and classes for the existing theme’s structure took needless time.
That was until I met Sandbox. Sandbox is billed as the themer’s theme. But its really a theme for CSS designers. Through some inventive manipulation of the code using some PHP functions, the authors have managed to add semantic CSS classes to almost every essential element for Wordpress. You can have different styles based on page, author, date, category… you name it. Just by putting classes on the BODY tag of the generated XHTML unleashes powerful design options.
Imagine… without and manipulation to the theme code itself you can do any of the following with just CSS:
- Hide unrelevant content based on page, post, category, etc…
- Improve your site’s print stylesheet to display print-worthy content
- Use images for your dates
- Make a “day” and “night” version of your site.
- Use custom backgrounds or graphical titles based on a posts’ category
- Use different colors for links, background and titles on your site based on the page or category.
I’ll keep going… in the meantime you need to go and preview the Sandbox theme and then get your hands dirty with it. You’ll feel like a kid in a sandbox again.
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