Frank Schulte-Ladbeck

A two column, red toned theme with a paper background

While listening to Dexter Gordon’s song “Cheesecake”, I began working on this theme, probably also inspiring the colors. The theme uses a softer color palette with uses of red to catch the eye. This was another experiment in using a paper texture as a background. The two column theme has been the structure I have focused on the most when considering what to do for websites that I am working on. Here is my reasoning: The content is placed on the left where the eye naturally falls to begin reading. Posts or pages are the real drivers to bring people to (and bring them back to) your website, so they focus on the writing. As their eye moves to the end of the sentence, they might glimpse something of interest in the side column, so they go back to view it. If you advertise on your site, they may see the ad, and go back to it.

This reasoning led to the idea behind the layout. You cannot create the perfect site to be viewed they way you want in all browsers. You can attempt to address as much as you can, and hope that you did it well. My concern has been will a new user bother to scroll over to see what is in the sidebar if they cannot see it. This theme was designed to be 800 pixels wide. This is on the smaller end of what is available for most computer monitors. I believe then that any item placed in the sidebar will at least be seen by the user. To highlight the offerings in the sidebar, I used the red to embolden the section titles. All of this is meant to have them explore the site. Keeping them on the site will help develop the sale or the idea that they should subscribe to the blog.

Another feature of this theme is the multi-stage drop down menu for the pages in the navigation bar. Free themes use a technique to create the navigation bar by listing all of the pages on that bar. This really defeats the purpose of creating a structure to your page content, when you have many pages. On one site, I have over twenty pages, which would place twenty navigation tabs on the site. Crowded navigation is of no use to the user. By designating a page as a “parent” and other pages as belonging to this parent, you will have a cleaner look in your navigation with this theme. Only the parent page will be listed in a tab, while its children will be there in a drop down form.

The header is basic, and my intention was for it to be easily replaced. You would need to upload an image the size 766 width by 125 height to the images folder to replace the header. The image has to be a jpeg file with the name “Header.jpeg”. With the red lettering, a lighter image would be suitable. If you have a darker image, the lettering should be changed to a lighter color.

Finally, as with all of my themes, the footer contains pages common to a small business. I thought that this would be a good general theme for any business. It may be nice for a personal site too. If using it as a personal site, you will want to remove references to those pages.

Download the Cheesecake theme .

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