Smarter is a Wordpress theme for small and medium sized companies. It's meant to build a presentation site in a minimum amount of time without touching a single line of code.
Featured Posts for Thematic
Featured posts are common in WordPress magazine themes. They let you promote hot topics and bring your best articles right in front of your users.
First thing we need to do is create a thematic child theme. This way we won’t make direct changes to Thematic.
The featured posts will be inserted on the home page before the rest of the articles. We’ll display the latest 3 posts which are tagged ‘featured’.
WordPress as a social platform
WordPress started in 2003. Since then it has grown to be the largest self-hosted blogging tool in the world, used on hundreds of thousands of sites and seen by tens of millions of people every day. But you already knew that!
By itself this blogging tool used to be just that: a way to put your thoughts out there, so anyone with a internet connection could read it. But WordPress is not just about blogging, at least not anymore. While still limited in terms of “out of the box” functionality compared with other CMS out there, WordPress managed to shine thought it’s plugins and themes.
Street is something that was created from a spark of inspiration, something that I felt should look like this. This wasn’t thought out nor planed.
It uses the beautiful Vegur Free Font for the headings and main menu, implemented by Cufon (text replacement technique). I’ve spent a great deal of time searching for the perfect free font for this theme, but I think I found the right combination.
While this child theme is just a skin for Thematic, because this exact reason is also functional. You have access to all 13 Widget Areas Thematic uses, the semantically correct HTML that is great for SEO, can use a page template that spans the entire width of the page without the sidebars and even you can upload your own logo or header image from the “Street Theme Options”.
An elegant Child Theme for Thematic
I hope you’ll enjoy using this theme as much I enjoyed creating it!
In order to install it you have to download the Thematic Theme (from which this child theme inherits all of the functionality), upload both themes (Street and Thematic) to your server in the themes folder AND THEN ACTIVATE the Street theme.
With the various theme hooks and theme filters, now it’s easier then ever to change the Thematic header with your own logo or custom banner design.
Until now you had to either change the header.php file in Thematic (something not really recommended) or use rather ugly CSS tricks to hide the existing content and use your logo or banner as a background for the #header or #branding div.
The end result will be a Child Theme Options page that will allow us to select if we want to use the default header or upload a header image:
Child Theme Options Page - You now have the posibility to upload your header image from WordPress
I had the luck of running into this book by accident. It managed to draw my attention mainly because it was a newly published book (February 4, 2009) compared to other books that discuss the web-design industry and user experiences.
The editor and author of some of the chapters, Linda Leung (a senior lecturer at the Institute for Interactive Media and Learning, University of Technology, Sydney) worked on this book for 3 years before publishing it this winter. As she describes it, this is not a ‘how-to’ book, but rather a ‘what might’ book.
Web design is the main subject of this book. Conceptual in nature, it engages the reader to think outside the technical needs of a project and focuses on finding inspiration in other fields. Creating value by incorporating alternative ideas from academic and industrial contexts, how feminism contributes to interface design, what film makers can teach us about story development, how accessible web-sites fail for people with intellectual disabilities, education, arts and even fashion.
It is a rather challenging read for a book of only 130 pages. I thought I’ll read it in a few hours, but that couldn’t be further from the truth. Each chapter guides you towards uncharted territory, opening new possibilities for the world of web design. I had to have a pen and paper next to me all the time to write down the large number of ideas that surfaced just by reading this book.
This book has left a mark on how I’ll see the world wide web and I have a feeling I’ll come back to it again and again. Definitely something worth keeping in one’s library.
If you’re interested the book is available through Intellect Books and Amazon
Spring is at it’s end and makes room for a promising Summer. Finishing the new design was a fulfilling moment for me. When you put so much effort into something, your personal expectations are always high. Building something for myself and things are prone to be problematic. In the initial stages nothing really feels right and nothing is good enough.
But now that the new design is live I’m happy I’ve changed it and with it behind me I can start focusing on other projects.
For the near future I want to release two new child themes for Thematic, one of which might even be released as a stand alone theme also, for inclusion into the WordPress Theme Repository.
The first theme to be released will be my design for Cozmoslabs. I still have to clear it up since it’s full of hacks.
The second theme is an artsy-grunge kind of theme. The design is almost done so I only have to implement it as a child theme. Here are some screen shots.
Feedback is always welcomed.
I’ve updated Commune Child Theme to version 0.2. This is just a bug fix release, most of them css related.
Thanks to everyone that submitted bugs through the comment form on the original Commune page.
Photo by divemasterking2000
I want a redesign. I need it to be forward thinking with easy access to most sections of the site. Although this sounds like I’m trying to sell something to a client, please bare with me. Creating an effective landing page (in my case the front page) is a must. This is not a tutorial, but a discussion, a way to put into perspective several elements of effective web-design. I’ll analyze a few blogs and web-sites that make good use of their front page and try to draw some conclusions that will help me in my own quest towards a full redesign.
There are several flaw in the current design, conceptual and technical. Technically there are some issues with IE that simply annoyed me to the point that I just ignored them. I want to integrate threaded comments and the footer isn’t exactly what I would like it to be. Also, I never got a chance to update to the latest Thematic version on which this blog is built because I didn’t need any of the new features. The content I had was simply happy with the current design.
From an usability point of view there are bigger problems with the design. Right now the articles are accessible through a right column with nothing but text and to be honest it looks like a big blurb. I want a better way to differentiate my categories, WordPress Themes and the services page.
To make it clearer this is what I want to achieve with this new redesign:
Read More
I have Author’s Block. I doubt it’s contagious so if you’re reading this no need to worry. Now to the mater at hand, why blog about it?
For some particular reason I don’t want to write that much stuff anymore. My fear is that I don’t write enough interesting posts! Why write about something that dosen’t resonate with me? Sure some people might find my articles useful, but will they return for more?
So I’m writing about web-design and developing. This is far from being a niche. Not in the internet world at least. I tried to focus my attention to WordPress and in particular Thematic since I’m using both in my business. It helped me differentiate from other blogs out there and some even found my WordPress category interesting. But I feel I need more. I want more variety in my articles. I could write about every WordPress and Thematic trick and post short pieces of code but I wouldn’t be any happier.
Next on my agenda? Short 4 day Easter Vacation 
Hopefully I’ll have a clearer head when I get back! I already have “some” ideas of what to do next (starting with a redesign) so I’m not completely in the dark.
And you know what? I already feel more confident now that I’ve shared this with the world (theoretically at least). Suggestions welcomed
Smarter is a Wordpress theme for small and medium sized companies. It's meant to build a presentation site in a minimum amount of time without touching a single line of code.
WordPress Wallpaper Pack
Do you love WordPress? Is the answer is yes then you’ll going to dig this! It’s a the ultimate prof that WordPress is among us for half a century!
Don’t believe me? Check out this WordPress wallpaper pack! It’s hippy, nippy, trippy stuff! Oh… and did I mention it’s cool?
It’s well flavored and available in 1280×800, 1680×1050, 1440×900, 1280×1024, 1920×1200, 1024×768.