Basic Maths WordPress Theme

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Khoi Vinh and Allan Cole have created Basic Maths, an excellent grid-based theme for WordPress that includes features like microformats, color-scheme control, full widget support and a key shortcut to display the grid. Not to mention it’s beautifully designed.

You can purchase it for $45. Well worth the price.        

A Redesign is a Comin’

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UPDATE

I just flipped the switch and moved everything over so it should all be done. Let me know if you find anything that looks weird, especially those of you on a PC. Enjoy.

Yup… again. I’m starting to grow out of this current design. I need something more flexible with more real estate for the posts and for side widgets. Better typography and usability as well.

You’ll notice that I’ve also begun to prepare the most recent posts to work with the new design. I’m setting some visual standards. A slight change in how I write out the headlines. Previously I use to capitalize all the words in a title including “a”, “the”, “of”, “is”, “on” and so on. Now I’m using a form of Title Casing where the first and last words in the title are capitalized as well as any word four or more letters. I’m also setting an image height of 700px for consistency. You’ll see what I mean when I launch the new design.

It’s pretty much done, I’m just making some final tweaks and I’ll probably flip the switch tomorrow evening. I hope you guys dig it.        

What Do You Think Of The Current Design For The Site?

I don’t know about everyone else out there but I’m the type of designer that gets tired easily of my own work, especially when it comes to the design of my sites. Historically, I’ve updated my designs every 6 months to a year. Recently I’ve re-designed my personal portfolio which I’m really digging (we’ll see how long that lasts) and now it seems like it’s time to update the design of this blog. Not really because I’m sick of it, just that I feel it needs to be freshened up. Maybe mess around with a new layout instead of the standard nav on the left, content on the right format. Also there are some functionality flaws that I think need to be addressed as well.

So, I want to hear from all you readers out there. Let me know if you love this design or if you hate it. What could be done to improve it or what you’d want to see in the new design. In the end I want the design to be something that everyone is comfortable with and is easy to understand and use. So let me have it, I won’t get offended. Leave me a comment below and together we’ll re-design this blog.

Oh one more thing… if you know of a really nice WordPress theme let me know about it and maybe I’ll use it.        

Another New Theme

So I thought about it for a while and I was growing tired of the look of the site. The theme was based on an Upstart Blogger theme that is great, but I was in a rush and it really didn’t come out looking how I envisioned it. So once I decided that it needed to change my initial thought was to create a whole new theme from scratch using Sandbox. I designed the theme is Photoshop and started to implement it into the Sandbox platform but I ran into the same problems as I did on my last theme quest. After some frustrating hours, I came to the conclusion that it would take too long for me to create a theme from scratch, I just don’t have that kind of patience. So I ended that and began focusing on finding a theme that was very simple, easy to customize and was built on some kind of grid system. Let me tell you, it wasn’t easy.

After some searching I finally found Marber by Apt Studio. It’s based on Romek Marber’s 1961 grid for Penguin Books, which is a huge plus, and when I looked at the CSS it was all clean and easy to understand. In no time I was on my way to creating a theme that I think represents my style as well as the content of this blog. I wanted a simple, clean design that payed homage to the modernist era and I think I accomplished. What ya think?

I’m going to be tweaking it in the next few days so pardon me if the site is down for quick changes. I haven’t tested how it looks on a PC so if those of you who do use a PC could give me some feedback that would be great.

I want to thank the folks at Apt Studio for creating such a wonderful theme. It might not be a theme with the most “eye candy” but it sure has a lot of underlining meaning to the form and structure that makes it so valuable. You can read a bit of the background to the theme here.

Here are some features:

  • A simple, two-column theme.
  • Six colour schemes, easily changed via the backend.
  • Three layouts, for 800px width, 1000px width, and fully fluid, again easily switched via the admin panel.
  • Widgetized sidebar.
  • WP 2.3+ only – includes tags.
  • Typographically set to a baseline grid.
  • Author comment highlighting.
  • Cross-browser compatible, with subtly different layouts for Mozilla, Webkit and IE browsers.
  • Integrated microformats.
  • Fully valid XHTML and CSS.
  • Integrated WordPress.com stats (with no smiley!).
  • Custom 404 page.