If you are a regular reader of this blog, you know that I switch my theme almost weekly. I have been told numerous times that I am not a designer, but I like to think that I am learning. I have put together a lot of websites for people, but never really spent time designing my blog.
Whenever I’ve made a site for a friend, I’ve had to find a current theme and then I re-skin it. Some of my best “re-skins” are Allison Torres, Sexiest Geeks Alive, and Phi For Fools. These are not my original designs, but I take credit for the creative input.
But all of the credit for designing my new site is given to Marc Mendell.
A few months ago, I set him up on Dreamhost and he said he would redesign my site. At that instant, I was honored because he is the art director for CNET Business. If you haven’t noticed, the sites from our division have the best design compared to other CNET sites (BNET, ZDNet, TechRepublic).
As soon as I saw his blog post thanking me for helping him with his site, I was really excited to cut the new design.
Building it wasn’t too hard because of the sleek markup in the Sandbox WordPress theme. I moved a few things around, and wrote a little bit of CSS and poof.
A lot goes into building a WordPress theme from scratch, but every time I learn something new. For example, did you know about all the different conditional functions in WordPress?
And it’s finally live. There are some bugs, but overall, it works. I want to add some more stuff to the right column, like my Facebook widget and a stream of recently uploaded Flickr photos.
I’d love to know what you think of the new design!
