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Over the last few weeks, I’ve been working pretty heavily in theme design, specifically for WordPress.  After taking the time over the Christmas trip home to learn CSS, I dove right in.  (It’s a testament to how long I’ve been playing around on the web, as CSS was still in its infancy when I started, and dynamically driven pages/sites and CMS’es were hardly around, but I digress.)

Running three different CMS softwares over the last year and change, I’ve come to some basic conclusions about the two most prevalent – Joomla and WordPress.  I can appreciate each one for the differences and likenesses they possess.

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So, if you’re seeing this here (at the site, I mean), then you’re checking out my new theme. 

The theme’s name is BlackPress – it’s a variation of a tutorial done by Richard Carpenter over at hv-designs.co.uk.  The tutorial just covered the Photoshop mockup, not the slicing and coding necessary to turn it into what you see here.  

I think that there’s one or two minor things that I’ll need to clean up, but otherwise, I’m calling this one done and moving onto the next project…

The quarter-ton duo from halftonreviews (Matt & Dan – half of the halfton quartet) are letting me work with them to really change their site around from this rather repetitive wordpress layout into something a bit more to their liking.  I think it’s possible.  With what I’m picking up from the WordPress Codex and other resources, as well as practice, everything should be good.

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Well, it’s done!  (Sort of…)

My first WordPress Theme is online!  You’re seeing it here.  It’s by no means 100% finished, but it’s really the first chance I’ve had to really work through the steps of creating a theme from start to finish.  Where it’s really lacking, I think, is in the design department.  You may notice that I drew a lot of inspiration from the previous theme (iNove), although honestly, when you start seeing so many of these themes, they all start to bleed into one another.  Graphically, I’m just not that inclined.  Especially when I’ve never done more than some basic editing in Photoshop and Fireworks.

That was actually one of my gifts for Christmas, some books on using Ps and Fw, so I’ll hopefully learn a bit more about site design.  I’m also scouring the ‘net for more design resources to give me the opportunity to try out different things.

To be honest, now that I’ve worked through a full creation, I might just go back and make the serious modifications that I want to iNove.  Always see what happens. =)