HeadsetOptions Web Design, SEO, WordPress, Etcetra

One of the best CSS designer offering free templates has a new home, visit Layoutica and you will see what I mean. David plans on offering among other things free CSS template layouts, premium and free WordPress themes. His sites also has wealth of information pertaining to web design.

As per David, Layoutica.com will deliver useful information for designers and web-developers alike. It will inform readers with fresh news about website templates and web design but also techniques in web-development. What are you waiting for, bookmark it!

In continuing our efforts of slicing and dicing a Magazine style WordPress theme, we come to a very interesting juncture with Java interfaces. This probable is the most ubiquitous feature of most all magazine themes. If you think about it, it makes sense that magazine style themes use this non-obtrusive code to help manage content.

These sidebar tabbed interface gives you the most bang for you buck in terms of digital real-estate. Granted that it will not necessarily minimize bandwidth usage by loading the page any faster, but nonetheless provides an alternative to having the entire content load on each and every page (even where …

Let me say it for the millionth time “content is king” and we all know that, don’t we?

Since content is the most important part of a site, your WordPress powered theme must emphasis on its presentation. Most cookie cutter themes come with a post list that runs based on the time your posts were published, in other words a chronological list of posts irrespective of its importance. Let’s face it, not all posts are created equal. Some posts are special, some are important and then some not quite so. Why then should all posts get the same treatment?

Magazine styled themes do a fine job of addressing this by introducing the featured …

Let’s face it, WordPress is not just a BMS like some might want you to believe, if used right, the full potential of the worlds best CMS can power sites big and small alike. One recent trend among high content high traffic sites is the switch to magazine styled or premium themes to aid in maximizing content exposure. But most all premium themes are paid and require customization irrespective off. In situations where you already run a well established site with custom design and need to add functionalities of magazine styled premium themes without switching or paying for a new theme, you are at the right place.

So how are magazine …

Once the reboot was through, I got mixed response from our users; so I went back to figure out once and for all if designing around 800px made sense anymore. As with ALA 4.0, most sites now support 1024px format or higher, no one talks or cares about 800px anymore.

I didn’t have to look too far for evidence, it was close at hand, all within my user tracker.

The result – less than 2 percent of the users are viewing our site with 800px screens, the majority of the users use 1024px. So there you go, 1024px is the …

If you are a frequent visitor, you will notice that the site was rebooted over the weekend using a fabulous design by WP Designer.

For the sake of comparison, I have included an image (linked to demo) of the original theme Gluttony along with a screenshot of the current version.

Of course the design is more than just CSS hacks, we added numerous conditional statements to make the experience more user friendly. The design itself …

A YUI grid based design that actually works across all browsers and validates now skins ManadrinMusing. The total design time was less than 12 hours and most were hand coded from scratch (except the YUI grid part that was corrected for validation). Check it out!

For those making the final submission of your CSS designs for the competition either tomorrow or the day after, I compiled this quick (should take less than 15 minutes) and a short checklist to help ensure your theme gives the rest a run for the money. At the risk of being called “Captain Obvious”, here it is:
Style
Hierarchy: Make sure your h1, h2… are all styled using commonsense formats to create a meaningful visual hierarchy. Sandbox does not use h2 in the sidebar like the Widgets do, so think about both scenarios, that is, users using your theme as is and those using sidebar widgets. (Time: Should take you less than 1 minute for this)

Dropdown menu usage: If you plan on using the default dropdown in Sandbox, leave the pages list intact for IE 6 users. If you plan on hiding the sandbox_globalnav, the div id is “menu”, make it “display: none;”. (Time: Again, should take you less than 1 minute to check)

This ‘how to’ tutorial was written for beginners/users designing a Sandbox based theme/CSS redesign using minimal CSS hacks and imagery. The objective of this exercise was to do “as little work as possible” while ensuring the result appears “significantly different” from the starting template. This is not the end-all strategy to design a Sandbox theme/skin, but merely a guide to get started. Enjoy.

Tools needed: Notepad, FTP (SmartFTP or similar) and PhotoShop or similar (any image editor should do).

In less than a couple of weeks, the Sandbox theme competition will decide a winner, but if you are anything like I am, you would probably wait to the very last day to create and submit your entry. So I feel it’s the perfect time to have a “how to” demonstrating the endless possibilities of CSS redesigning for those procrastinators waiting for a sign to get started. And no, this demo theme will not be submitted to the competition but will be released freely for Sandbox users sometime soon. Here’s a quick reminder of the rules.

Just to briefly touch on the Sandbox theme, as described by its creator(s), “The real feature of the Sandbox is its markup. The use of class-generating functions in key elements (the body, post div, and comment li elements) creates the most extensible WordPress theme available”. So all you need is some basic understanding of CSS and you should be ready to roll.