A Wild Vista

So, the WildVista blog is finally up and running. WordPress is ridiculously easy to install, and thus far, I haven’t come across any insurmountable problems. Actually, I haven’t encountered even the merest hint of a snag. Everything’s made sense, and everything’s worked. It’s early days of course (as the vanilla layout has no doubt already tipped you off), but so far, everything in the WordPress garden’s rosy.

Time to dig a bit deeper then. With the edit and post functionality already taken care of, and having explored the various settings and options to make sure everything looks sensible, I reckon theming is the first thing to take a look at.

Now, as you’d probably expect, WordPress comes with a powerful and easy-to-use theming system. What this means is that, given an extensive directory of free themes, it’s the work of just a few mouse clicks within the WordPress dashboard to apply any of these themes to the entire site.

WordPress themes are easy to install: simply download the theme’s component files, and dump them in the wp-content/themes/ directory. The newly installed theme then automatically appears in the Themes section of the Appearance panel in the WordPress Dashboard.

So, what does changing the theme do? Here’s an example comparison of the front page rendered using the standard (and currently applied) “default” theme, and using the “Fusion” theme:

WildVista blog with Default WordPress theme

WildVista blog with Fusion WordPress theme

It’s not clear from the above screengrabs, but “default” is a fixed-width theme, whereas “fusion” (for this basic test at least) is a flexible-width theme. So, themes aren’t limited to controlling discrete elements such as the typeface or background images and colours, but also the dynamic layout characteristics.

It’s one thing downloading free themes and applying them to your WordPress site, but to achieve a specific look for your pages, it’ll be necessary to modify an existing theme, or create your own from scratch.

For the WildVista blog, I certainly want to move away from the default theme I’ve started with. There’s nothing wrong with it per se — indeed, it’s a very clean and clear design — but it’s not personal, and it’s used by myriad other blogs.

Before getting into the technicalities of creating a bespoke theme, it’s worth taking a step back, and thinking about how best to approach the job. The basic steps are:

1. Design
2. Implement
3. Test

For the design step, it’s best to step away from the computer. Pen and paper are all that’s needed to start sketching out various layouts. There’s no need at all to be getting bogged down in HTML or CSS at this stage; the technical implementation can take a back seat for now. Sure, there may be some aspects of a given design that turn out to be very difficult to implement in a WordPress theme, but right now, I don’t want my designs hampered by unnecessary restrictions.

Now, I’d better go find that pencil sharpener…