Frank Schulte-Ladbeck

A three-columned theme with a grunge background

One of my passions has always been the art of design. I will claim no mastery, but working on my own theme inspired me to create new themes of my own. Part of the reason for this site’s makeover was to share those themes, because I hoped that they might prove useful. My plan is to release a theme each week. I do have a few more that I might release early next week, just to have a few themes to choose from.

The inspiration for this theme came from following two independent coffee houses on Twitter. Each was using a different technique to pull in clients. When I thought about it, I felt that they could also use the blog format to help expand on their tweets. My idea was that this theme would fit any small business catering to the creative class.

The menu bar is at the top of the page, so if you have a products page and a user does not want to read a blog post, they can go to it immediately. The content (posts) will be placed on the left side of the screen, which is where the eye of a reader of a Western language will fall. I have two sidebars on the left. Parts of the site which may be accessed more often are on the left sidebar, while remaining items are in the right sidebar. Part of the idea is that if you add other pieces to these sidebars, like advertising, you will not have one crowded long sidebar where the user cannot find what he is looking for.

Since I had a business in mind, I did place in some links for pages in the footer that a business might want to include on their site, like a “terms of use” page. Also, I have the RSS feed placed there. These can be deleted. Look over the theme to see if you need such pages listed or not.

If you are downloading this theme for personal use, I think the only true elements that bespeak business are in the footer. Otherwise the theme would work for personal use. Have fun with it.

Download the zip file for the Building Swirl theme.

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