Thinking About Wordpress Themes
You may be able tell that I’ve been experimenting with a number of Wordpress themes since moving my blog to a new host, A Small Orange, a couple of weeks ago. It’s been fascinating to see how many themes are available - many of them for free - and the wide variety of resources such as Wordpress’ Theme Viewer you can use to find one.
So far, I’m sticking with Brian Gardner’s Blue Zinfandel because it has many elements that I like: a clean look and feel; three columns with sidebars on the right and left; it’s widget and plug-in ready; and has just a healthy dash of blue to go with the dominant white colour. If I could figure out how to get rid of “Test” and replace it with something like “About” in the header, that would be a good start. 
While I’ll continue to explore other themes just to see if another one really catches my eye, I think the next step is customizing Blue Zinfandel. I’d like, for example, to have re-do the header with something more personalized. The sidebars needs a lot of TLC. I’d like, for example, to include a “mini-blog” widget (Rob Hyndman’s Scribbles features is particularly nice.)
If anyone has suggestions about good themes or resources to tweak themes, I’d be most grateful.
Update: Wordpress will be launching a Theme Marketplace, which will be a place where developers can distribute and sell high-quality theme.
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October 29th, 2007 at 11:55 am
Actually, the Blue Zinfandel theme is the one I went with. You can see it in action here: http://joshoverland.com.
As you said, make sure you get the widget ready version off his site and not the one posted to wordpress.org as that one wasnt widget ready (at least the 2 column version wasnt as I tried that first).
Re the scribbles: Not sure what he is using to do that but I use Twitter. It may also be possible to embed Tumblr or Soup.io posts into a Wordpress Blog but I havent tried that yet.
October 29th, 2007 at 12:19 pm
Josh,
Thanks for the help/insight.
Mark