Frank Schulte-Ladbeck

A two columned, black toned theme with a white background and blue highlights

Maybe I should name all of my themes by the music that I was listening to when creating them. In this case, it was David Bowie’s “Heroes”. I wanted to get away from the textured pattern background for this theme. When I look at possible themes to use on a site, my eye is drawn to dark colored headers with white backgrounds for the content.

This theme was meant to be more general purpose for various small businesses. I noticed a few consultants using that basic idea for their sites, and with some header manipulation, this may be good for your business. Imagine adding a photograph to the right hand side to add a personal touch. If planning to use this as a CMS, I would remove the sidebar elements which suggest blog, like the blogroll and categories.

The sidebar is composed of individual blocks for widgets. The distance between each block is two pixels, to create a divide between each element. The headers are in blue with the buttons in a lighter shade of blue. I thought that the blue would go along with the black, and hopefully not take away from the company logo that could be inserted. The idea is to have these elements noticed, but not clamoring for attention. This color scheme was carried over into the link colors for the content.

I would move and change the RSS button, which is currently in the footer. I am leaving it in the footer in my themes, because I want you to make your own decision to its placement. I discovered with my current theme setup that the footer can be lost from view to many readers. Yet people still find it. I left it orange in this theme, because this is a visual cue to users (most sites have an orange RSS icon). I would change it to match the blue in the sidebar elements.

The navigation is below the header, and it includes a multi-stage menu. I am coming to the belief that this navigation effect is better for business sites. When you plan out your pages, you will find them in groups. A multi-stage menu allows you to maintain those groups, while keeping a clean look for the navigation. I also like the visual cue of having the opened page highlighted, with the others not having that tab outline around them. I went for below the header, because I feel that this would be a better position for the user to navigate from.

If using this theme for a personal site, you will want to remove the pages listed in the footer, like “Terms of Service”, which are meant for a business.

Download Heroes theme.

No related posts.

Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.