Since I decided to redesign the theme ahead of time, so I spent 6 hours making a new child theme. And you might be asking, why are you changing the design if the old one is okay?
From April of last year, I created my first major theme based off the Thematic Framework. It took many hours since I don’t have a sufficient knowledge of CSS. Because of this, I had to play trial and error. Eventually, I liked the design and made several minor changes over the months. While the design looked fine, it had some quirks with the layout and such. Because I’m redesigning the theme and color scheme when my blog turns three years old next February, I may as well overhaul the backend of the theme.
When I was deciding on the theme framework to use, I didn’t want to use a free theme since these designs tend to get overused, especially the Twenty Ten and Twenty Eleven themes (especially with the sidebar removal being a pain in the butt). I made a decision to spend some money to get a premium theme that will last into the future. After looking around, I have chosen to use StudioPress’s Genesis as I can create a child theme like I did with Thematic and it’s not too outrageously expensive compared to Thesis. This new theme still uses the same color scheme since I haven’t come up with one with some noticeable changes, which makes it look cleaner. Of course, the theme itself reduced the need to use a few plugins like WP-PageNavi, which will hopefully take the load off the site. Also, I’ll be adapting this theme to Shiori’s Diary when this design gets finished.
If you have any suggestions on what I should add or change in the new theme, make a comment below and I will take a look at it. Besides from that, enjoy the somewhat new design!
I must say, I’m a fan of the new theme, especially the sidebar. The only feedback I can think of giving is concerning the header. It could be spiced up a bit if you want it to stand out, unless it was intentionally meant to be unobtrusive in the first place–which I’m assuming is the case since you made the background transparent. Also, I just noticed that the colors change as you scroll down. Very neat!
The banner background is transparent since I started using gradients with the backgrounds. They are now done through CSS3, even though the method used isn’t in the web standards yet, which means it won’t work in IE9, but work everywhere else.
I have did backgrounds in the past banners, but it didn’t really blend too well with the background. So, I decided to play it simple. I’m still thinking about the 3rd Anniversary design, but I still have several months until I need to get that up.
Cool new theme! Looks so organized and pretty. And you’ve mastered the uses of gradients, I see. Something I still need to work on. And just noticed your randomized blogroll with icons, that’s a really nice idea.
If you know CSS and a bit of PHP, using a Theme Framework is always the best starting point to creating a theme since it’s easy to customize with a clean layout and you can get new features when the framework gets updated. Everything is simply done in a child theme and you just edit the functions.php and style.css. Besides the premium frameworks, there are some free ones like Thematic and Hybrid. On the other hand, it takes time to get a design you will like, but using the Web Inspector or Firebug takes the pain out of customization.
There are a few people in the Aniblogosphere using Thesis. I tried a questionable copy of it locally and I was unimpressed since it’s too complex and it lacked the ability to create child themes. Also, its pretty much out of my price range and I have to save some money to pay for another round of hosting in 2012 (I might get an intern to offset this, but yeah).
Also, the blogroll icons is done by a plugin called Faviroll. It essentially grabs all the favorite icons and put them on the blogroll.