Hicham Maged's blog Inquisitive curiosity paves knowledge path

Blue: A New Look

If you are following this blog, you shall notice the new look; yes it is not an illusion my dears as my blog renovated with a new theme on the 3^rd anniversary of acquiring my domain name in 2006 and shouting out loud my first Hello World over here, so make sure to clear out your browser’s cache to view it correctly.

This blog entry deals with describing my criteria for picking up and customizing a theme for my WordPress based blog. Please remember I am neither web-designer nor programmer yet I enjoy web-designing as I described the journey of me, myself and websites before.

Blue Theme: A New Look

Customizing WordPress Theme

The process of choosing and customizing a new theme for having a new look is always fun yet it is not that easy at all since I am often looking for something that reflects my mind. Hereby, I want to preface with this simple tip: you may not find what you want exactly as you thought about but you can always customize and tweak them to reach the nearest image.

This is what I try to with the themes I pick especially when they are GPL license and bellow I am going to list the main phases for customizing a theme in order to have a new look.

Phase I: Picking up a Theme

At first, I often start with browsing many on-line resources to pick-up something that I feel myself within. It is indeed a hard process because it is not only about the layout that is close to the image I have in my mind for the final new look; there are also other technical aspects are included on my check list which are:

• Licenses: GPL ready or not?
• Design: widget ready or not, customizable or not?
• Core Functions: compatible with latest CMS versions or not?

These factors affect my choice in parallel with the outlook I want to reach for the final new look, so in this phase usually ends by picking up few themes out of hundreds.

Phase II: Theme Customizing (or Makeup)

The few download themes usually go for another filtering process; as I try them on a local server which – for those who do not know – means testing on your personal computer using simulated Linux hosting environment. This can be done by many programs and for me I depend on [WampServer] where I try to use the same versions of my hosting in terms of “Apache”, “PHP” and “MySQL” in order to be very close to the real hosting. Hereby, I have a geek tip: it is a good idea to have a backup copy of my blog on the local server till to play with the themes or any modifications. Hence, I keep with this technique till reducing the choice to only one theme.

Back to the process, once picked out among the downloaded themes, I start the customizing (or making-up) process as I often place my own touch on the theme in terms of layout, colors, typography and theme functions which always make it different from the original theme.

Phase III: Pre-Launching plus Crediting

It a must for me to credit the original author/theme developer by placing a link in the footer, so maybe others are interested in it. Consequently, I usually place information in header of the theme’s style.css file after finalizing the theme customization process in order to credit Open Source and/or Creative Commons materials that I used while going through this make-up.

New Look: I am Blue

The new current theme passed through this process and I choose the blue color to master its new look since I am in love with this color but it took me sometime till I finally felt comfortable with its degree in addition with other blues or complementary colors to use.

I tried to make harmony with these colors which means going through many trials; you might have an idea how effort it take if you know that I made 5 style sheets till I reached this process. In a future post, I shall talk more about this process beside typography but this post to cut a long story short.

Finally it is ready: a new look with blue theme

Themes List Documentation

Since 2006, I cycled four themes other than the new one, so I documented this by placing links to them under the “Red Carpet” document in order to keep a technical record for tracking what I have used. It is good to keep on upgrading your experiences as I expressed before and every theme I used reflected a new one. On the other hand, this is a good way for crediting developers who published these themes and thank them as an end-user even if I changed the theme.

Finally, I feel comfortable with the new look of this blue theme and might only make some few modifications and tweaking from time to match with any major updates with WordPress. Hence, I hope the colors are okay with you especially when you comment bellow.

Note: The blue color and the new look reminds me with “Blue song” in the 1990s, so let me quote it’s beginning:

Related Quotes and Sayings

I’m blue da ba dee da ba. — Eiffel 65 band

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Tags: blogging tips
Categories: Tech
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