Frank Schulte-Ladbeck

Archive for the ‘Themes’ Category

A three columned theme in green and yellow tones with a more newsprint style. The idea that this blog theme would be good for new reporting.

I have been reading quite a few blogs that are industry or topic specific news reporting sites. When I have a newspaper in front of me, I do enjoy glancing through all the sections to see what may catch my eye; however, I do not care for such generalities in a website. I prefer going to one site that will delve into the topic. More and more I find that these sites are written by a team of writer/editors who take submissions for ideas for posts or the posts themselves. Being curious about green home trends, I have spent a good deal of time on a few green/sustainable news type blogs. One thing that I noticed is the fact that they do not use what are really green design elements to reduce the user’s energy usage on their pages (dark backgrounds to reduce power outputs). White backgrounds are the predominate choice. Standing outside on this cold clear day, I was looking at the green and yellow leaves on the plants around me. Having everything look crisp meant a white background to me.
    Another three columned theme. News sites have this desire to pack in the information or objects. I am beginning to appreciate three columns more as a few of my sites mature. I do not have the desire to pack stuff into the sidebars, but I do have the desire to give everything space.I found that cramming it all into one sidebar was too much. In this theme, I separated the sidebars around the content. If the object was less important to me, say a list of links that I want on my site, but that I know the users hardly ever click, I would want them in the sidebar, which I would place to the side further away from the content (the sidebars being side by side). In news sites, we have a different scenario; we need to stress a few objects (most recent posts, most popular stories, or a photo of the day and all of this interspersed with the advertising). In this case, I think having the content flanked by the sidebars works to our advantage.
    Even if you are dealing with one topic, you can still have different subtopics. I placed the header above the menu navigation. The title is to the left, as is the slogan. The navigation bar is tabs with the open tab being shown clearly in the white background. Other tabs are left darker when not in use, and the submenus have the yellow background to distinguish them from the body of the site. I heard an argument against submenus You may be hiding a topic under another heading, which a new user might not realize. True, but maybe not. Thinking back to the newspaper, I could have a “Lifestyle” section. Under this heading we could find fashion designs, new places to hang out, and cooking. A submenu may not be great or perfect if you have not thought through your information architecture.
    Stripping it all away. You have to look at the icons that you are using. I love icons, since they can add visual interest to a plain site. Yet I found using some standard icon designs for the comments or author obtrusive. This theme leaves the data of posting date and author below the post title. I find that useful. Below the post, we can find the tags. I wanted to move away from listing the category of the post here, and I find the comments listed in the post footer can be a benefit or hindrance. I removed the comments icon, since a new site might not have many comments (I do not like the idea of turning the comments off as some suggest- just do not advertise no comments).
    As a final note, the idea for this theme was playing around with a basic news site, but this can work as any type of blog. The sidebars are currently filled with the basic features of search, archive, and category. The footer contains the basic link set up for a business site. The rss is left in the footer. I like the rss feed at the end of the article for a news site. If I like the article, I can subscribe, and you want subscribers who like the articles. Then other space can be used more wisely. If I was establishing a blog, I would add the rss feed into the sidebar or the header (I left the header slightly larger than I normally do for adding something like that or an image). The theme name? I was listening to Souixsie and the Banshees “Kiss Them for Me” (maybe because I had recently seen the Cary Grant film) when I began this theme, but the inspiration was looking at a garden on a winter’s day, so “Monday, Monday” came to mind.
    Download the theme Monday.

A dark toned three column theme with a blue header. Yellow writing on the dark background.

I analyze sites. Mainly those of my competitors, but I look at the design of each site that I am on, and I try to determine what do I like about the site, and what can I do without. I have also been thinking about how we interact with digital media. Furthermore, I have been considering the energy efficiency of having dark backgrounds. At first, I thought of dark background for sites which loaded quite a few images. They work better. Then I thought about readability on a dark background, and could we have a site that uses a darker hue for a more content driven site. This theme addresses those thoughts.

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A grey toned three columned theme with splashes of purples and reds for excitement.

I have not produced one of these free themes in a while. I have been working on a few projects that took me away from these little experiments. Usually for a free theme, I play with a few basic ideas that I see being used by a small business to discover how I can tweak the theme a little. I had been exploring various Steampunk sites, because I liked what I was seeing in the artwork. As for the sites, I would really love to explore the use of typography more, which is not easy to do in a free theme. Today I had a break, so I began to play with textures instead of thinking of a business or art style.  This doodling lead to the following theme.
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Basic two columned theme in tones of green. Might be used for a gardening blog or a site dedicated to “green” matters.

The movement towards sustainable design in our homes, and a thoughtful lifestyle to improve our health is all being bundled up in the concept of being green. More websites are popping up to deliver information or sell products to consumers. This trend is not going away. The concepts in this field will become mainstream; incorporated into our lives as normal procedure. In the mean time, we are left with simple sites designed in green. I was disappointed with the look of a few of these sites.To be green would really mean using a theme with a black background, but this does not go down well with users. (There are some wonderful themes created in black though).  I began playing with the idea of what could be a basic theme for a green site, and this theme is my response.
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Blue toned, three column theme with a white background

It has been some time since I released a free theme, or written about my efforts. Too many other projects. Hopefully I will have time to complete work on a customizable theme. This is a striaght forward theme design, hence the name from the Thelonius Monk piece.
    I noticed that as social media becomes more important to internet users, website owners have been looking for ways to tie in various accounts to their site. Blogs still have a place in this environment. They become the home base for business owners, which can bring their social media efforts together. This theme is no frills to meet the need of these businesses. The theme is designed for laptop screens (1000 pixels wide). The content is on the left side. The columns are in the center and the right. The menu has dropdown submenus. The menu style is more business website, rather than the typical flare associated with blogs. The blocks in the columns have a basic title with no fanfare.
    Why is this better for being your social media base? What I am seeing on my travels is that site owners are adding many images to their sidebars for various reasons. If the theme has a busy feeling, then more images will cause confusion to the user. Social media buttons can be placed in one column, along with typical blog items like an Archive or Blogroll section. What I also noticed was that most of these sites have a block for a sales pitch ad for an ebook or other main product. The point of stripping the theme down to bare essentials is to allow these other features shine.
    The header is 150pixels in height. I am imagining that this could be replaced by an image. I am planning on releasing a part two to this theme with the header split. Image for one side with social media buttons on the other side. This would leave more advertising room in the columns.
    DownloadStraight No Chaser.

A theme for real estate professionals who want to blog.

When you work in real estate, and you are on the net for work, you find yourself encountering the same people in different places. Rich Danserau, over at Postive Real Estate Professionals, told me that I should check out the work of a lady named Rebecca Levinson. Since I trust Rich’s advice, I headed over to her ActiveRain blog. Needless to say, I was impressed. When we connected on Facebook, I did pay more attention to a program that she had developed to assist other real estate professionals become top bloggers called Blogging Tune Up. She works with only one real estate professional in a market with their blogging skills to help them succeed. She has many happy clients.
    I told Rebecca that I would love to create a WordPress theme for her to give away to her clients, so she gave me a few specifications, and the Real Skillz theme was born. The theme is in blue tones. The header comes first with the blog title and slogan centered to make the first impact for your brand. After the header you have a menu bar. The categories are left in the sidebar of this theme. If you choose your categories and sub-categories carefully, you can make a greater impact by having them displayed here. Rebecca had suggested having an about me section in the sidebar (a place to write about yourself to help build your brand). Add the “About Me” widget to your sidebar, and I would have this as your first sidebar item.
    The theme has two columns: one area for the posts; and one for the sidebar. This allows your blog posts to command more attention. Since real estate professionals rely on many visuals to help their clients, the theme was designed with the idea of making images pop. The blue background helps images of the home stand out. There is also a black border around the images to help emphasize them. Most photographer sites use black backgrounds to help make the images stand out, but Rebecca’s choice of blue is clever. You can still write content that will be a focus and have the images noticed. To help make content important, a “related posts” feature is built into the theme (no plugin needed). To have the sidebar content be noticed, a lighter blue was used for the backgrounds there. Currently, the search feature is the top element in the sidebar. The next element is quite nice to encourage site exploration: a tag cloud. The post headers emphasize the title, while the post footers have the post meta data in a light blue bar. This is where your tags will be displayed.
    Lastly, most of my themes, I leave the RSS button down in the footer, so you can place the RSS where you would like. In this theme, the RSS button is located below the post title, where the other meta data like the name of the author is located. As with all of my themes geared towards businesses, I have a reminder to include a Terms of Service and a Privacy pages. If you do not need them, you can remove them.
    If you need help having your blogging career start off on the right foot, then you should head over to Ms. Levinson’s site. She may be able to help you.  Download the Real Skillz theme.

A theme inspired by some steampunk objects and a video. The theme contains dark tones with a more sci-fi feeling than Victorian.

    I like steampunk, and I have been working on a few object for around the house and garden. After seeing the video for “Sleep Isabella” by Abney Park on YouTube, I thought that creating a WordPress theme may be fun. I did go looking for steampunk websites to see what they had done. I did like them, but many seemed to focus on the look of printed material, and I was thinking “what would a steampunk computer interface look like?”. Since seeing the other sites, I do want to create two more steampunk inspired themes. One theme will be closer to Victorian/Edwardian printed material, while the other will be a play on a Biedermeier desk.

    First, if you know me, then you know that I am concerned with eco-issues, and I like the idea of a dark theme to save energy via monitor usage. I focused on using different dark textures with bright highlights. The use of stripes was based on an outfit from one of the singers in the video. I am not the best when it comes to creating web graphics. I opened up Gimp, and started creating collages from some images that I had, so these could be better. I would love to create a better clock icon for the date. Still, I like the results.

   Fonts became an issue. For the next theme in this series, I will work with the @font-face in the stylesheet, and see if I can find more appropriate fonts. For this theme I chose a variety of fonts that are fairly common which I thought worked. Most steampunk sites work around the font situation by placing fonts in the images, but for a free theme, that would mean making a header image with a fixed slogan on it. I wanted users to have their own options. I think that I would add images to this theme.

    The menu bar has drop down submenus. I went with colors that I thought worked well for a dark theme but also reflected some common colors seen in steampunk objects. For visited links, I had the color go gray. For hovered links, I simply went to an itallic font. The brass bar that is seen in the index page is not used for pages or single posts; I thought that would be too much. That image is in a div element, so you can easily add it to those pages if you want.

    Overall, I think this theme works for deign sites or retailers who have a creative edge. I was thinking of developing a design site for objects that I collect after I had created this theme. The dark background does show of images. I saw some retailers who may like this type of theme. I might modify some icon elements to better fit with the specific business.

   Tell me what you think. Does it meet your vision of SteamPunk?

Download the theme.

A two columned theme that was inspired by my garden.

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A two columned theme with a dark background and red accents meant to be an energy efficient for monitors.

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A three columned theme in brown tones

With the Voyager series, I was experimenting with using variations of some basic colors: red, green, and blue. My own tastes tend towards earth tones. I find that when used in web design, earth tones produce more elegant looking themes. There are many websites with white backgrounds for small businesses, but as the web matures, I believe we may see more sites focusing on other tones, which will create more individuality. This theme begins a series where I want to explore earth tones in a site.

About the theme name, I am following my habit of naming the themes after songs. In this case, I was listening to Charles Mingus’ recordings on the Candid label. Great work if you like jazz. “melody of the Drums” was one of the pieces recorded by Mingus for that label.

I did not have a specific business in mind when working on this theme, but I did discover that a few Realtors who had sites in similar tones. I began to think that the theme could be good for a clothing shop. Images are framed in a lighter hue to make them stand out, so it may be nice if used in that field.

Features:

Header: I like the navigation on the top for this theme, because I imagined that an image could be placed on the black background of the header. I left the header large for that reason. A light colored logo would fit well over this subtly textured dark header. I am sticking with the multi-level navigational elements. With this theme, I think that this adds a cleaner, elegant feel.

Sidebars: I have two sidebars that are thin. My thoughts were that widgets could be added, and they would be seen quickly by a visitor. Having one sidebar will have widgets or other sidebar elements pushed down well below the fold. Not all users will scroll down your site, so I would have your important elements towards the top of the sidebars.

Article body: Again, the hues are meant to have elements subdued. The meta data under the post title is de-emphasized, while the meta-data in the footer is highlighted by a box. The images have a lighter colored border to help them standout. The fonts used are more typically used for blogs, but I felt that they made reading easier on the eye.

Footer: I put in links for pages that will be better for small businesses, so if you are using this theme for a personal blog, you will want to edit the Footer.php to remove those page names. I left the rss feed icon in the footer, but I would make a social media box in the sidebar above the search box. The footer is not the place for this element, so think about where you may feel works better.

Other features: the theme has a print stylesheet to make printing a post easier. Also, several languages were added to make the theme available useful in various countries.

Download Melody of the Drums.