Well, it’s finally here! I’m making this post my “launch post” after too many weekends spent poking around finding the right blog software and template for my blog. I have had this problem whenever I approached something with deeper knowledge… getting started is harder because of the “I can do this better” or “I can do this myself” syndrome. Since I knit, I would often put off buying a sweater in a store, since I knew I could knit it, and when I used to throw pottery, I would admire a fine piece of work and add it to my list of project “to dos” instead of simply buying the dang thing. Same deal with necklaces and earrings (although I’ve made some pretty cool pieces for myself).
So, why should it be different with creating a blog? I work at Google, so of course the first stop should be Blogger, and I tried it out. (I’ll probably see if I can port my two previous posts over to this blog.) Blogger was fine for basic needs, but Word Press just has such amazingly cool features and all that great open-development collective love. I need it: geek love, that is. So, that choice finally made, I went on to explore the WP templates. (The rest of this post is mostly geeky ponderings, so click the More link and be warned!)
And WP templates there are, by the scads. But maybe I can help you out if you’re searching for that really good Word Press template. I found that while there are lots of really pretty templates out there, not all of them are widget-aware, so be sure to look for that first. In fact, the best way to search for a template is to visit the Word Press Theme Viewer and select the features that you want from the checklist on the left. Here are some things that I learned about this.
- Go for widget-aware themes
You want widgets. Trust me on this. As you get going with your blog, you’ll want to include your web album, RSS Feeds from other places, and other cool things like that. So check that widget-ready checkbox. - The majority of themes are fixed width
Frankly, I’m not sure why this is. From my perspective, the best usability is a flexible one. (And others agree with me.) I tried to poke around a few templates and change the layout in the CSS from fixed to fluid, and quickly realized that years of experience doing layout markup using tables and simple CSS does not prepare one for CSS-based layout for dynamic content. Nope. I started down that rabbit hole and found a really cool site on CSS layout, but decided I wanted to start posting more than I wanted to extend an existing theme. Still, I think fluid width is nicer because some of us have big, honkin’ screens and we want that text to scale. Other people disagree, and say that we humans don’t want to scan long lines. We get bored, or something, I guess. The designers want to have control over layout, and flexible layout != control. I say, “Screw that! Try reading for a change. This is my blog, and I don’t have to do that annoying executive summary or PPT presentation here.” Anyhow, super-short lines aren’t so easy to read, according to some. - Don’t get hung up on the rounded corners thing
A colleague at work came up to me a few months ago and asked about the cool rounded corners on some of the Google properties. Like Gmail, for instance. Nice, page-like presentation of your Inbox with rounded edges gives you the warm fuzzies. “How do you do that?” he wanted to know. I said, “It’s harder than it looks, and it’s an image, and you have to craft it all by hand in CSS.” In short, it’s a pain. And what is the aphorism here?
Anything that is pretty, trivial, and painful to implement will become the most-desired feature in web technology.
I worked at a company in the late 90’s where we had cutting-edge integration with purchase ordering systems (Bahn, SAP) in our B2B ecommerce software. Customers invariably asked for pretty navigation, mouse-overs and other trivial features that rendered differently on all browsers. Drove the PSO folks mad. One engineer I spoke with who left the company (long before it disintegrated into, like 6 people) told me, “I’m going to this other company, and it’s NOT WEB.” Another company that I worked for had a whole host of designers who did the pretty pages and a cadre of application engineers to create the publishing system for the daily release of pages. We had a most-sexy front page that listed all the faces of our advice columnists inside a yin-yang symbol. One day, an engineer broke the layout on the test site and asked for my help. All the faces, instead of aligning nicely with the swish of the symbol, fell down one after another in an ugly list. I looked at the code (all layout in CSS) and pronounced, “Oh, you have a hard carriage return here in the HTML before you finish your JSP tag.” He debated with me that this made no sense whatsoever, and I agreed with him but told him to take out the carriage return anyway. He did and the page was fixed. I think that engineer decided to leave web-development behind as well.Oh but I do digress! Really, leave the rounded corners thing alone. It’s nice, but not ALL THAT. Go for the other features that you really want first, and then, if the template runs wells on both FF and IE, you’ve got a keeper. If it has rounded corners, great. If not, make your own.
So, what did I go with? I chose Mandigo as my template, even though it is fixed width. It has such nice features, both functionally and visually, that the fixed aspect of it was something I could live with. See? Life is always compromise. Still, the same guy, Tom, also makes a fluid template called Royale. It’s a bit on the dark side for me, and I’ll probably switch to it after seeing how much work there is in changing the “dark-on-dark” to something a bit perkier. This guy has really thought through all the details though, as you can see when you load this template and check out the theme options. In particular, his theme options include the ability to insert 3rd-party HTML markup using the theme options, rather than having to manually edit the header.php files and so forth. So, for example, if you want to insert a Google Analytics tracker into your Blog, this will be retained in your actual settings for this template. That means that when the time comes to upgrade Mandigo, you will not have to remember all the snippets (maps, analytics, weather) you stuffed everywhere, save them, and re-insert them in the upgraded template. Pretty thoughtful!
Some other way-cool templates worth a look:
- Sadish
This guy has free templates and premium templates that you can purchase. - vSlider3
Ok, this is one customizable template! I wonder if Rui got any sleep? You can tweak to your heart’s content, and not only can you choose either fixed or fluid design, it also comes ready for Gallery2 for WP if you have Gallery2 photos. Cool.
Well, it’s time for me to sign off and go tweak the font size of this baby, which means tweaking line height and every other related stylesheet aspect. A most time-consuming occupation. OH! and then for some more customized headers… yes…
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