Frank Schulte-Ladbeck

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.

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