It took me a bit longer than I thought but I have the new site up and running.  You may say, “Technically it’s not a new site, it’s just a theme replacement.”  To that I say NAY.  While I am still using the same installation of Wordpress on the back end,  the new theme is 100% custom.  No templates, no reworking of older theme files.  100% new, and using brand new features packed into Wordpress 2.9.

The new theme was developed Photoshop, chunked up, put into xHTML, styled, chunked up again, and put into Wordpress.  I’m not a big fan of using Javascript, but I like Lightbox so it has been included in the site.  I used the 960 Grid System at 16x for spacing.  On a side note, for anyone not using the 960.gs you really should.  It’s very easy to use and you will save SOOO much time in formatting.  For commenting and account management I have added FaceBook Connect support.  While I don’t have a problem with users using Gravatar, I would say that it’s obvious that more users have a FaceBook account than a Gravatar account.

One thing that will go unnoticed by most and only appreciated by fellow designers and developers are the drop down menus for Topics and Projects.  If you check the source you will notice that there is no JavaScript; the menu’s are all CSS based.  While it’s not the greatest coding feat in the world, it’s not the simplest either.  More so I have confirmed they work in every browser besides IE6 flawlessly.  IE6 gets no love.  I spent zero time on IE6 compatibility.  If your still IE6 you are not part of my target audience.  I didn’t leave them totally in the lurch though.  IE6 users will receive this message provided by ie6nomore.com (click for larger image)

IE7 users get a small nerf on the graphical side.  It appears that IE7 was having a VERY hard time rendering my transparent PNG background.  It would render the background, but IE7 was having a heart attack.  So instead of making IE7 users deal with it, I substituted the PNG background with a black background that will only appear on IE7.  You IE users should be using FireFox anyway.  There is also a issue with Safari & Chrome working correctly with li:hover.  The li:hover attribute is working in the four subsections under the recent posts, but won’t work for the 4 recent posts on the right side on the main page.  I think this has something to do with putting text on top of an “a” tag that is set with “position:absolute”.  I’m going to work on that issue, but it is definitely on the back burner as it does not effect functionality of the site.  Once again, should be using FireFox .

I developed the new theme to make it easy to see new content as well as find and discover older content.  On the front page you will see 5 recent posts.  Under that there are 4 subsections that show posts from my most tagged items.  These posts are random, so every time you go to the main page you should see different a collection of different posts.  In this theme topics = categories.  If you go to any of the topics from the menu only the latest post in that topic should be expanded; the rest will be condensed.  I did this so that readers don’t have to constantly scroll down.  They can browse easily and if they see a post they want to read further they just click it.

The Projects section is self explanatory.  Right now there are only web projects up there as I have no other projects in the works.  Should have a hardware project coming up soon though.  I’m using the same Gallery plugin (Fotobook) that I was using with the previous theme.  I didn’t need to make any modifications as it was already working perfectly with the new theme I built.

I am pleased with the way things turned out.  I have been talking about doing my own theme for almost a year now and I finally did it.  Next thing I need to work it is adding thumbnails for every post instead of the generic one I have up for most now.  That’s going to take a while.  Any feedback would be appreciated so feel free to leave a comment.