Three sites launch on Custom Kickass WordPress Themes
All three of these sites are about as different from each other as you can get, and each one was a fun challenge to present the personality and visual identity of the site owner.
Des Paroz of Blue Beyond needed a facelift on his existing WordPress installation that features his fabulous underwater photography from off the coast of Australia. I wanted to make visitors feel like they were the ones looking through the camera lens at the colorful denizens of the reefs. Using transparency on the right column to let one of those fish peek back at the viewer, the way he (or she) did at Des’ camera, allowed me to give an immediacy to this design that was lacking in its predecessor.
This is a three column flexible full screen width design that has widgets and the flickr gallery plugin integrated, to give Des lots of functionality and flexibility in adding his sponsor ads and other interesting tidbits to his sidebars and the area above his posts.
It’s not often the client provides me with such stunning eye candy to work with! The images I had to choose from were a joy to preview. Take a look through the gallery and you’ll see what I mean. And if you’re a diver and/or an aspiring underwater photographer, give Des a yell.
The TrainSignal Training folks needed their existing WordPress Theme polished up and spiffed up to reflect their professional image as IT Trainers. I utilized their existing header image, since it established a nice visual identity, then blended it into a rounded, smooth, and slick look that better matched the image they were trying to project, using the colors that were in the existing image. A professional look was what this one needed.
This is a three column flexi width widget enabled custom WordPress theme. In order to more easily facilitate the placement of the widgets, the column areas were named by color so that exact placement in wordpress admin could be easily determined. A top content area widget was also added only to the front page, so that Trainsignal could utilize that area for news and announcements of special interest to their readers.
Since their launch on this custom blogskin they’ve already had an article published on CNet, which is fabulous! Check out their blog, which is chock full of IT and tech news.
I love doing sites for Fiction Writers, since they always have such fun filling up their sites with cool stuff to read! The Laura Bowers site is no exception! She’s already got some . . . um . . . INTERESTING photos in her “about” section (must have been a HELLUVA wedding reception!) not to mention a very fun excerpt from her soon to be published book, “Beauty Shop for Rent”. Laura had this to say about her new site, “I’m so happy with how it turned out. A friend of mine said it’s so “Me!” ”
We put Laura on Wordpress as a CMS, with a Page as homepage, but with a twist. We did a mini loop to pull her latest three blog entries into the homePage down bottom so that it combines the best of a static homepage with the googly goodness of fresh blog entries on the homepage, by using the mini loop in the home template. She’ll be using nested Pages as the site’s main structure as her booklist grows, but using the blog area as a way to announce her touring appearances, book launches and also to blog about the art and business of writing for a living. This is a two column fixed width layout, complete with gerbera daisies at Laura’s insistence.
As you can see, WordPress can take on many faces with a Custom WordPress Theme from Kickass. Got an idea in mind? Let’s talk.
Technorati Tags: Custom WordPress Theme, WordPress Template, blogskin, widget
