The original Vrooom!-theme. Click to see demo.

I have not been vey productive in terms of content over the last few days and that is mostly due to the fact that I’ve had my head deep down into .php and .css files. I’ve redesigned my blog into something I, personally, find fairly pleasing and aesthetically decent. It’s sleek, its dark and it’s mine.

Before I begun the redesign-process, I used the theme deFusion by webdemar and I wished to carry on with at least one element from this theme, namely the drop down menu/nav-bar. That is, the functionality, not necessarily the looks. Yet, I also wanted a look that more closely resembles my other sites, ushersyndrome.info and roflmao.me. Looking through the themes-category of wordpress.org eventually gave me not only inspiration, but also code to borrow.

webdemars' deFusion theme. Click to see demo.

I don’t know if having an all-site fairly similar visual style makes any sense to others, but it’s got to be a fix idea for me. Anyway, the last few days have been an intense battle with tags and code, but also very educational, as I’ve begun to grasp some basic CSS, and PHP/HTML. I got some extremely valuable help from my eminent girlfriend, Annci, and also a crazy Finnish guy I know. Back in the days when I first learnt a little HTML (the 90s), there was hardly anything but, well, HTML. Sites where static and simple. Later innovations such as powerful scripting languages and style-sheets came, but I never followed the development. Now I’m finally starting to feel I’m catching a little bit up with what’s happened between the lines over the past 10 or so years and getting to a stage where I can produce at least moderately useful websites, but I do no doubt have a long way to go. Regardless, if you’re an Internet-addict like me, I feel it’s almost required to at least have some basic knowledge of the media you’re using so much…websites.

pacq's Tomorrow theme. Click to see demo.

The result of my latter-day coding frenzy, is a site that’s fairly unique, although obviously classic WordPress. It is also a real Frankenstein as it consist of two-three different themes. More specifically the Vrooom! theme by Rajaie AlKorani provides the bulk and body, the Tomorrow theme by pacq’s inspired the font-styles and the beforementioned deFusion the drop-down nav-bar/menu-bar. Now, I like simplistic design and dark colors, probably because it’s more pleasing and calm to my own eyes. Unfortunately it has some drawbacks too, which font-colors to use is one of them. If they are too solid and sharp it doesn’t look good. In the end I settled on a couple of different gray-tones and a soft blue for links. In the end, this is my site and I do whatever i want! There are still things that could be better, and I will probably make some minor changes and fine-tune a bit here and there, but overall I consider myself done and I plan to settle on this look for a while and rather focus more on content.

If you have any comments or suggestions to my design, feel free to drop me some lines. I might, or might not, take them into consideration, but generally speaking I always like to hear peoples opinions on things that concern me.