Making it Yours — An Inept Guide to Website Design

And when I say ‘design’, of course, I mean theft.

Regulars will have noted that things don’t stand still for too long here on twopoin­touch. Apart from the post count. Fiddling with new themes and plugins is almost com­pulsive beha­viour. While I’ve only had around four long-​​term favourite themes over the last five years, there’s every chance that you’ll have dropped in at some point when I’ve been doing some­thing totally dif­ferent — for about five minutes.

This con­tinual urge for dal­li­ance when it comes to off-​​the-​​peg themes has now led me in a totally new dir­ec­tion. Actually making some­thing for myself. It’s all a bit scary and random, but one of the things that I’ve learned is that there’s lots of info and tools to help you out.

This is how I started.

I like the func­tion­ality of the Hybrid theme for WordPress. It’s got tons of page tem­plates, plugin-​​compatibility and SEO right out of the box. So let’s start there.

It’s built for designers, and one con­sequence of that is that it looks a bit drab when you use it ‘naked’. The author, Justin Tadlock, encour­ages people to develop child-​​themes. For a while, I used his Structure template, which I cus­tom­ised very slightly to allow for full posts on the home page and the spaceman picture that I stole from the won­derful artist Jeremy Geddes.

Then I managed to break that, while trying to upgrade some­thing else. I know how I broke it, and I could go back. But the breakage made me feel that I ought to be doing some­thing else. That I should be trying to make some­thing of my own.

So I rein­stalled Hybrid and created a child-​​theme. This means that it takes everything Hybrid has to offer, but then gives you a blank canvas at the same time. By a blank canvas, I mean a new CSS file that can override every element in the theme.

Looking around recently, I liked the look of a theme called Clean Simple White. Up to a point. I liked the clean and simple bit, but there seemed to be loads of lines all over the place (according to my simple aes­thetic sens­ib­il­ities). It also didn’t work with the pages I’d already made and I like serifs for body copy — sue me.

So, I thought, I could take some of that look and remake it with Hybrid. You have to learn a tiny bit of CSS (this site makes it really easy) and you really want the Firebug exten­sion for Firefox for testing and stealing things. And then it’s just trial and error.

I’m quite pleased with the look so far, but it’s maybe a bit wide and I want my spaceman back — maybe as a sort of ghost image behind the header area. Let’s see how we go.

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