shanehigginbottom.com

As I mentioned in a prior post about my blog theme re-design I have contracted forest parks for his professional design services to do a custom wordpress theme for this blog.

I’m not saying that I don’t like this wordpress theme by garryconn (you have to subscribe to his email list to grab a copy).

But I figured that this being my personal blog I wanted it to have a little more personality, or a little more of my personality.

I sent forest a huge amount of image elements that I thought we might do a few things with.

I’m also a little handy with adobe photoshop so I sent him a mock up to play with so he could see which direction I was heading, or wanted to head in.

All I am going to say Is forest is wickedly creative. He IM’d me yesterday in gmail to let me know he had a rough mock up for my re-design.

My custom wordpress theme design ideas

The funny thing is that some of the images I sent him were of some scrabble board pictures, specially for the rss feed and subscribe options.

I hadn’t in my wildest imagination thought of doing a scrabble themed header. Which is very cool !!

• I took pictures of the deck from the cottage which was one of the images I sent to him to be used as the back ground.

• As well I sent him some pictures of cardboard to be used in some way as a design element. I’m liking the way it is going to used as the content backdrop.

• I also sent him a picture or two of how I wanted my subscribe to my newsletter form to look. I scribbled on a napkin my subscribe to my newsletter form. (As you can see). Yes the coffee stain authentic. It was the only napkin in the cottage if I remember correctly.

The main design theme might fall into the grunge theme category. Grunge is what the designers call this category of wordpress theme design. Who knows really.

But I wanted it to look like it was sort of cobbeled togethor fom bits and pieces of my life and things I like to do. Almost scrapbookish.

So what remains to be done on this theme re-design.

We still need to work out a navigation bar which will sit in the header? or as a seperate class on its own?

We still need to work out the comments form box which I would like to use an empty beer box for.

We still need to work out some of the other sidebar elements or myabe put some of my sidebar elements in the header. Such as the RSS feed icon idea I sent him.

One thing I havent really thought over in too much detail is what is the main purpose of this theme.

What I mean is that every blog theme should have a purpose. A design purpose that guides the reader into some desired form of action, either to just show case talent, featrued content, capture Rss feed subscription, newsletter subscriptions, sell a product capture clicks. Theres a wide variety of things you can do with a wordpress theme to entice readers into some form of action.

Some things to think about and ideas to play with.