Over the last couple months a few really Kickass sites have launched on Kickass custom blogskins. You’ll see that the scope and variety is quite broad. Even though I curse at WordPress- often- I still can get some xhtml/css goodness going with it in the custom WordPress Themes I design.

The Fanboy and Goth Girl site was a fun one to do. The intent was to mimic a comic book layout, since the main character in the novel this site is about is an aspiring comic book artist. The site was completed in time for the launch of the novel. Barry Lyga, the author and site owner, has been busy populating it with images and book reviews. On this site I also integrated a Plogger skin to mimic the WordPress skin since Barry is planning on having an art competition and other contests in the near future. I created editable side column areas separate from the template files so that Barry could more easily add a few images to the left column without digging through reams of template code, thus saving him from making an inadvertent and messy mistake. The top of the left column is a random file plugin we installed for him to showcase exerpts from the book.

Jon Strocel of UpNext.ca wanted a sleek web 2.0 look for his video/TV graphics production company. We collaborated to give him the look he wished, using graphics from his shop to complement his clean and simple design. As you can see from his many entries, it’s working well for him. Since Jon planned on spotlighting different aspects of technology I gave him a pullquote class to work with. This is a box that is set into the post and set off from it with a border and a slightly different color background. Jon has used this device very effectively in his postings. We had originally talked about using WordPress as a CMS for this site, but the timely nature of what Jon does has him using it as a straight up blog tool. Either way it works well.

Given some images of screenshots from sound editing programs and told to make it bright and dramatic, I had a lot of fun designing Blink 7. The header graphic is a large-scale pointillistic version of one of those screenshots, which you can see if you know what they look like. The idea was also to make it echo the look of flashing lights on a sound board or console, with the border around the letters made to look like neon. The motif was carried down through the rest of the design. Since Greg, the site owner, figured he’d have a lot to say we used an expandable menu for the sidebar to keep it under control as it grew.

If you’d like to find out about having your very own unique custom WordPress Theme designed, contact me and we’ll talk!

Enjoy!

Technorati Tags: custom WordPress Themes, site launch, technology, video production graphics, teen novel, plogger skin, website design

This entry was posted on Tuesday, April 11th, 2006 at 5:03 pm and is filed under Web News, Site Portfolio. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.