I’ve just uploaded a new design to the blog, and also to the front page of the website.  Feel free to give me feedback on it!

I’ve used Artisteer, a program for making Wordpress templates. The only item I prepared myself was the image of myself. I tried to cut out all the background and make it invisible. Not easy to do when you’ve got hair as fluffy as I do, and the background is White! I saved it as PNG, which preserves the invisible background, and then imported it into Artisteer as a photo that was floating on the header background. That way any embellishments on the header won’t be over the photo of me.

The rest is done in the program. All the color choices were made one by one - there’s no way to set a custom color palette. I would have liked that, because it’s a chore to change all those colors to my palette. But apart from that it’s really easy to do, if you choose a pre-existing palette, and don’t fiddle as much with the photo as I did - there are built in photos of generic people in the program, along with landscapes and cityscapes for the header background - it could take you ten minutes flat to build a template.

When I was done with the Wordpress template, I made a few structural changes, and saved the same project as HTML. I did a nondestructive edit, and copied the project file to a different name, just in case I wanted changes to the blog template without affecting the HTML version.

The HTML output needs a lot of work once you’re done with it. You need to change the menu choices - in HTML, and you should change headers here and there and content. But once you’re done with all that, you’ve got a file you can use as a template for other pages on your website. Just remember that if your site has a folder structure, you should use absolute links in the menu, or the links could easily break deep down in your site.

I also opted to move the css and js files to a subdirectory, as well as change the name of the folder of the images to layoutimages, to avoid any conflict with existing files in my site.

The really painful job is of course the cleanup of all the outdated stuff my website has accumulated in the course of the 10 years it’s been online (total, including before I bought the domain name), and also convert all the pages to the new design. I fully expect to make several versions of the design and do some fancy copy and paste of code to make it all work. That’s the beauty of it, you could have two columns on some pages, and three on others - the overall design would still be the same.

I’ve never used sub items to menu links before, and especially liked that. I had a lightbulb moment when I wondered what to put under the CONTACT menu item that was created automatically. Should I keep it? I realized I could put Facebook, Myspace and Flickr links in the sub items, and just point the main item to the front page. Brilliant.

This entry was posted on Sunday, October 12th, 2008 at 4:00 pm and is filed under Tech. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.