Theme Tweaking Hints

Posted on Monday, October 23rd, 2006

I’m busy at the moment, what with getting to and from work (admittedly taking up most of my time), playing rugby and keeping up with friends, family and eventually sleep. This is my attempt at an explanation for the poor quality of this blog at the moment.

But, I’m not just going to disappear because I run out of hours in the day to do all the stuff I want to. That’s one reason why I am posting now, you always have to make time to do things for yourself. I also fixed my stereo earlier, which was of great importance having bought a number of CDs recently and being unable to play them, but that is beside the point.

There is one other reason I haven’t turned to typing too much recently. I haven’t had this design for three months yet and I’m already busying myself in the background tweaking and turning it into an almost entirely new theme. I’ve got the bug that Yvonne seems to have permanently, and the same headaches that are keeping Nyssa from posting. It is, however, all for fun really. Soon you will see what has been going round my head but failing miserably to transfer to code and screen.

Hints

I’m not posting now to hand out hints on tweaking or design (not when my redesign is in the state it’s in at the moment), I just wanted to say that there is more than just a change of colour scheme going on here*. There are already signs of what may be happening to my theme that will make it unique to my purposes and I was wondering if anyone had spotted them. Put a little more simply, this isn’t just a change in my CSS.

So I ask, what do you think I’m doing to this site? Are there any changes you would make? Maybe I’ve thought of them, maybe I haven’t. Do you like tweaking your theme and do you have any stories of how horribly it broke in Internet Explorer when you checked it out?

My new design will be out soon, it’s not done yet, but at least I know what I want it to look like. Oh, and if you think it will look good in the newly released IE7 first time around, you have to be joking!

* I’m not changing my colour scheme, you’ve got to think harder than that!

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Comments

  1. 1October 24th, 2006 at 12:28 am

    Nyssa Says:

    Hmm, I would try and have a guess at what tweaks you’ve been doing but I haven’t been here before a couple of days ago to really be able to notice. ;)

    But I’m looking forward to it, anyway. :)


  2. 2October 24th, 2006 at 1:08 am

    Yvonne Says:

    I think you’ve made the sidebar a bit larger? Whatever you’re doing, it’s really subtle :^)


  3. 3October 24th, 2006 at 1:42 pm

    Phil Says:

    The sidebar hasn’t changed width yet, Yvonne, but it probably will ;-)

    And don’t worry Nyssa, once I unveil the (heavily) tweaked layout and design, you shouldn’t have any trouble noticing the difference.

    I wish I could spend time just doing this redesign, rather than thinking and posting about it. But I suppose I’m not being paid to play with my own website (or even comment on it, but it is my lunch hour!). I’ll get it done soon, don’t worry!


  4. 4October 26th, 2006 at 3:51 am

    dave Says:

    looks like you took my suggestion and implemented the ‘wide’ design ;-)


  5. 5October 26th, 2006 at 12:58 pm

    Phil Says:

    Sadly not Dave, the new theme isn’t here yet (though will be soon) and is anything but the wide format.

    But, I will re-implement a wide design, just for you and Greg.

    If you are seeing the wide design, it’s because the style sheet switcher uses cookies to save your choice, so you always see the design (and font size) that you want.


  6. 6October 28th, 2006 at 1:58 am

    Nyssa Says:

    Well Phil, I look forward to seeing it! :)


  7. 7November 12th, 2006 at 10:21 am

    Hans Says:

    Yeah, you’re right building a theme from scratch isn’t something sensible to all bloggers. For me to escape all the messy affairs of IE, I built my theme from one that was already looking and acting good in IE. That way I only had to change the design, the icing on the cake without worrying much about the actual code. That saved me lots of time.

    As for some future changes, some I might guess:

    1) the width of that sidebar dividing the page equally into two takes more space than required.

    and that’s all. I think there should also be some time where we should stop bothering so much of the design. Some buzz somewhere to tell us when.

    Good luck for your future theme. Guess some surprise is really awaiting us all ;)


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