Since graduating in April, I have been brushing up on my HTML5 and CSS3 – the code behind the look of a website and its main content. After we moved to Indiana and I had a little more time, I also added PHP to my studies. PHP is another coding language that is often used in the creation of blogs and dynamic websites. Anyway – it is mind blowingly cool! I’ve been having lots of fun learning more about web design.
On Monday I decided it was time to put my new knowledge to the test and began designing a new wordpress theme for The Jackson Post. I’ve been planning on doing this since starting the blog almost two years ago, but never had time. Once I started I had a hard time stopping (not even for sleeping) and by Wednesday morning things were ready and up and running. Some of you may have already discovered the new changes since they have been around for 5 or so days, but after all the time I spent on the computer, I needed to step away before even writing another post.
Hope you enjoy looking around!
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Looks good! I like the scalability of it too! I would, however, probably either ditch the stuff on the right or throw it on top when you get down to iPhone size. But if your’e anything like me your’e probably thinking of setting web design for a bit before picking it back up again. Did you start with a boilerplate theme? Also, is this the default wordpress commenting system? Do you get a bunch of spam comments?
Jon, thanks for the feedback! Great idea for the iPhone size – I coded using percentages and ems instead of pixels so it is more scalable, but I didn’t finish styling with all the media queries that I need to to make the smaller version look right (break time!). I actually used a starter theme called _s. I changed some things around in the theme (such as taking the navigation code out of the header and turning it into an include file and calling that file in the location I wanted the menu to show up). I like how simple and well documented it is, as well as easy to style. I haven’t had problems with spam comments for awhile – although it was a problem at the beginning. I don’t remember everything I did to fix it, but I do use the Akismet plugin. I don’t know if that is what solved it completely or if I did other things, but I’ll look around if you want.
I LOVE the new design! And I’m glad that you shared what theme you started with because I’ve been wanting to do this for 2 years but haven’t found a good starting theme to modify.
I actually spent a couple of weeks and coded a WordPress theme 100% from scratch to make sure I understood php and the WordPress loop. I found that process quite helpful in then designing the starter theme because it is so minimal in the code. If you have any questions I’d be happy to help!