I finally decided to go live with my new WordPress theme – it’s still something of a work in progress so expect changes on a regular basis.

The main design aims that I focussed on were:

• Remove clutter to clarify the main content
• Improve readability
• Retain essential page elements but keep the page clean as possible
• use CSS to progressively enhance the design for upscale browsers without losing usability in older or less capable ones

I’m particularly pleased with the post footers,  The list of categories and tags, sharing buttons and previous/next post links always seems like an unavoidable bundle of junk so I decided to minimise it until required.

links-on-demand

From a technical standpoint I wanted to create a theme virtually from scratch in order to learn more about how WordPress works and to have a theme in which there are no mysterious bits of code that I’m unfamiliar with. As a bit of a PHP newbie, it’s been a great way to start working with the language.

Further work

There are a few things which I’ll be trying to do as I go on

• Microformats – The markup has so far been thrown together fairly haphazardly, I’ll be trying to clean it up and insert proper microformat markup
• Image optimisation – I think I need to do something to reduce image sizes for the post headers.
• Stealth Widgets – I have a spark of an idea for including more sidebar content without cluttering the design

I’d appreciate any feedback, particularly as there are many good WordPress designers out there who’s advice I value.