A new website?
You shouldn’t have.
I’m putting the finishing touches on a new WordPress theme. It’s still a little rough in places, comments need formatting, lists need sweetening, various twiddles need to be twaddled. But it’s mostly there, so why not take it for a test run?
This theme is fully ‘widgetized’ (to use the WordPress nomenclature) which means it’s a lot easier to customize. I’m also working on a few fun little tricks like shortcodes (like for the image above) to allow for a little more aesthetic control of the published web content (while not borking the internal tools)
I have a couple of goals with this design: Use nice typography and keep it minimal. I realize the primary way people interact with a website nowadays is to follow a link from somewhere to the specific article. That link might be in an RSS feed reader, a search result, a twitter posting, or whatever. Very few people are going to websites directly to browse for content.
This has two implications: Reading is your user’s first priority. Searching is probably second, and actual clicking around on the site is a distant third (maybe fourth if you have some funny pictures of cats).
With this in mind I decided to keep the navigation minimal, and present the content front and center. Archives are off on their own page now (it’s widgetized, I could bring them back whenever), ancillary links are down at the bottom for when a reader gets done reading.
Technical Notes
Right now this theme should work in modern browsers including Internet Explorer 7 and 8. Internet Explorer 6 is probably making a mess of this site. I’m not sure if I care or not.
You may have noticed that this type ain’t Arial. I’m using new-ish font embedding techniques which should be rendering everything in a lovely Bodoni-esque typeface for you, unless you’re using an ancient version of Safari or Firefox. I am using Font Squirrel to create font kits. They host many open source or non-licensed fonts and provide a tool to roll your own font kits.
The rest of the theme is straight-forward HTML and CSS with a minor bit of tweaking to some default WordPress functions.
