Hicham Maged's blog Acquiring knowledge lead to the acquisition of power

Blue: A New Look

If you are following this blog, you shall notice the new look. Yes it is not an illusion my dear; my blog is renovated with a new theme on the 3rd anniversary of acquiring my domain, so make sure to clear out your browser’s cache to view it correctly.

Theme Rendering

This post deals with describing my criteria for picking up and customising a theme for my WordPress-based blog. Please remember I am neither web-designer nor programmer so in fact, the process of choosing a new theme is always fun yet it is not that easy at all since I am often looking for something that reflects my mind.

A simple tip is that You may not find what you want exactly as you thought about but you can always customise a theme or tweak it to reach the nearest image and this what I try to with the themes I pick.

Phase I: Picking up a theme

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

• Licences: GPL ready or not?
• Design: widget ready or not?
• Core Functions: coping with latest wp version (currently 2.8)?

Phase II: The Makeup

After I pick up few themes out of hundreds, I download and try them on a local server which -for who do not know- means testing on your 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.

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. Once I picked it, I start on the making-up process as I often place my own touch on the theme in terms of ‘Layout’, ‘Colours’, ‘Typography’ and ‘WP theme functions’ which always make it different from the original theme. Nevertheless, it a must for me to credit the original author by placing a link in the footer so maybe others are interested in it.

Blue, Da Ba De

The new current theme has passed this process and I choose ‘blue’ colour to master it since I am in love with this colour but it took me sometime till I finally felt comfortable with the degree of the colour, and other blues or complementary colours to use.

I tried to make harmony with colours and this took 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.

Themes List

Since 2006, I had cycled four themes other than this new one. I documented this by placing links to them under the “Red Carpet” page 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.

Finally, I felt comfortable with theme, and might only make some few modifications from time to match with any major updates with WP, but for now It’s okay with me to make it blue like that and I hope the colours are okay with you especially when you comment bellow.

p.s. talking about Blue, who remeber 1990s Eiffel 65's ‘Blue’ for that matter?

“I'm blue da ba dee da ba ...”

Related Pages

• Red Carpet

Related Posts

• Me, Myself and Websites

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