I designed this site myself. Starting out I had no previous experience of web development

Having settled on Wordpress as the blog-engine, I realised that I had to get to know the following technologies if I wanted to create my own Wordpress theme: Like an Old-fashioned Journal…

• CSS
• PHP
• HTML
• Wordpress Codex (functions)
• Photoshop

I have wanted to learn web coding for quite a while, so I didn’t mind the challenge. I bought quite a few books about the technologies mentioned above. Many late nights later, what you see on this site is the result!

Style: Old Fashioned Journal

I wanted the site to reflect my own style, as well as the tone and themes of this site. Hence I came up with something that is meant to recall an old-fashioned journal or diary.

The theme is inspired by the following:
Jugendstil Exhibition Poster

• Natural Materials: Wood, Linen, Writing Paper, Ink…
• Turn-of-Last-Century Look, (i.e. ‘Jugendstil’ or ‘Arts and Crafts’ or ‘Art Nouveau’): It is supposed to represent old-fashioned craftmanship.
• Symbolic Items from Nature and Daily Life: Have you noticed the stones, cones, keys and other objects scattered throughout the theme? They are randomly selected from a total of 16 objects currently available.
• The colour of the linen table cloth (only visible on 1280px width screen resolution and upwards) is changing according to the time of the day! Spot the different colours available!

Supported Browsers:

The preferred/recommended browser is Firefox 2.0 and upwards. Opera 9, Seamonkey, Internet Explorer 6 and 7 are also supported.

Unfortunately I have not been able to test in Safari and Konqueror as I have no access to a Mac or Linux machine. I’d really like to support these. Please let me know if you are using these and experience problems.

Challenges

It turned out that I had chosen a really challenging design! Achieving a semi-stretch design that can cater for anything between 15″ up to 30″ screens (try minimzing the browser window…) took me quite a while! The ‘layered’ look made it all the more difficult. I would not recommend a similar project to a fellow beginner. Start with something basic!

Anti-Microsoft Rant…

I was flabbergasted at the amount of bugs relating to CSS that were present in Internet Explorer 6. Those bugs probably doubled my development time.
A faster, better and free browser!I never liked Internet Explorer (always used either Firefox or Netscape). However up until learning CSS I had not been aware how sub-standard IE really is. The fact that it is the most widely used browser just illustrates Microsoft’s skills in pushing inferior products out to those less tech-savvy computer users in order to keep its’ monopoly at any price. They should focus on improving their operative system instead!
All my HTML
should be valid…!

If you are an Internet Explorer user, I strongly recommend you to switch to another browser for security reasons if nothing else. You might want to check out (click the button to the right!), Seamokey or Opera or Firefox itself .

Ads

Yes, I am using them on this site…. But not in a too tasteless way, I hope!

I designed the Google ads to blend in with the theme. Hopefully they should be reasonably relevant to the content, and therefore a few people should click them. That will help me pay my hosting costs. I fully respect people who run an ad-blocker and therefore don’t see my Google ads.

The Amazon ads are meant to be helpful and I will really only recommend books I have read, that I own or that I am sure are very good. These ads should be nothing but beneficial.

Your Thoughts

Do you like this theme? What could I have done better? I know this is a ‘Page’, hence it does not accept comments. But please leave a message at “Site Feedback Needed”. That is the post where I am asking for feedback on bugs and other things relating to the theme.

Technorati Tags: art nouveau, jugendstil, wordpress, coding