I have finally finished the new design of IAMWW.com. I began the redesign a few weeks ago when I found the minimalistic Upstart Blogger Minim WordPress theme by Robert Ellis of Upstart Blogger. I thought I would just personalize Upstart Blogger Minim a little to suit my tastes but then kept making changes, then it turned into a complete remodel. Now here is the final result.
Only by dumb luck did this redesign happen to coincide with Spring 2007 CSS Reboot. Just so happens the design was pretty much complete and I had the day off from the day job.
Here is a quick list of some of the things changed from the original Upstart Blogger Minim:
- Moved the side bar to the right side of the content.
- Created a header for my new logo and the site navigation.
- Added the JavaScript “browse” drawer in the navigation bar to show / hide categories and most popular posts using the files already loaded by WP-Lightbox 2.0.
- Modified the loop to remove my short posts category from the regular content.
- Added support for the various plugins currently used on the site.
- Created page templates for the main pages of the site.
- Compressed and optimized the CSS per Paul Stamatiou’s great article.
- Utilized the_excerpt Reloaded for the excepts throughout the site rather than the built in WordPress excerpt.
- Removed most of the inline styling from the site core and added it to the optimized CSS.
- Various other changes in the CSS and PHP throughout the site.
Some sites that inspired me while working on the design for their great design and their use of WordPress as a complete CMS:
This site was built in Mac OS X Tiger on my 20″ iMac using TextMate, Smultron, Transmit, CSSEdit, and MAMP. The WordPress Plugins used on this site can be found on the About page.
The new design has been tested in Firefox and Safari in Mac OS X and Firefox and Internet Explorer 7 in Windows XP. I have only found an issue with a couple of pages in IE 7. I will fix that once I have figured out what is causing the issue. Other than that the site seems to look good to me. Let me know in the comments here if you see any issues.
The current code is not likely to validate. Therefore, I did not actually submit this site to be judged as part of the Official CSS Reboot competition. I do hope to tweak it to validate soon and I am not happy with the look of the current footer.
9 Comments
Wow! Really nice job modifying my template. Your site looks great.
You really do not know how much it means to me to hear that from you. Thank you!
Your site looks so good!Very nice.
Woulnd you share your theme?
If “Yes”,please give me e-mail.
This site is running a customized theme I built just for this site. If there is more interest from people wanting to use the theme I may make it available as a public download. However, until then I do not plan on making it available. Thanks for your interest though.
Thanks,also.
Yesterday I found a lot of wordpress themes for my blog,but on one I satisfied.so I hope you release the theme.
Thank you very much!
Ya ya, I too would love having this theme on my site. Actually why not create a tutorial, give us a little every day!
@Manu Khanna - Sounds like an idea… However, a lot of the functions of the site have been hard coded into the site. However, I designed the theme over a few weeks and it may be difficult to recant all of the steps. I will consider making the theme more drop-in compatible with WordPress and probably release a download.
Great :). By when do u plan to share the theme with us?
I have been on call this week and have not had any time to myself. Therefore, the release will probably take me a week or two. I would like to realign the theme that remains on this site before I finish up the theme to be released. Thanks for the interest and keep an eye over the next two weeks for the theme to be released.
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