Macabre Ink launches on a highly customized WordPress Theme
This has to be the most fun I’ve had in a long time. David Niall Wilson is a Horror Writer, and his wife, Patricia Macomber is a writer and editor for some pretty stellar Horror Mags. Both are Bram Stoker Award Winners. So when David came to me to see if I’d be interested in doing their joint website, Macabre Ink, I was about as enthusiastic as I could possibly be. Who wouldn’t be? Blood and bones, wow!
This site actually runs off two separate wordpress installations, one for David and one for Trish. The site’s homepage, pictured in the first thumbnail, is a highly customized and differently styled home template run from David’s side of the site. We gave the opening page a really dark and edgy feeling, to set the mood for inner pages. The challenge here was to give David something he could edit completely and yet pull in Trish’s posts as well.
Inside the site are two completely different designs, one for David, the Shadeaux, and one for Trish, the Light.
David told me he wanted horror and his guitar in his blogskin. He also told me he lived near the Great Dismal Swamp and loved it. So I took a great sunny photo of the Swamp and played Hide-A-Skull with it in my graphics programs. One of the skulls came from a castle in Prague, another from the Catacombs of Paris, and a third from the killing fields of Cambodia. I then added a possible reason for those skulls, but you have to really look to find it. Down below I used a photo of his guitar and added a hint of gruesome guitarist. David said I captured exactly the feeling he wished for the site, which is the best compliment a web designer can get. I can’t wait to see how he does with this!
The theme is completely widgetized, with three widget sections on David’s inner pages. One is the top of the right column, and two are the skinny columns lower down on the right. This gives David the flexibility he needs. Since he plans on using nested pages and categories, he needed the wide column to accomodate the nesting. But we didn’t want the right side to get too long, so the breakout below into two narrower columns allows less important navigation blocks to be included without the design going too long.
Trish’s side of the site is a reworking of their original site design, taking the header graphic they had and incorporating it into the Kickass-SpookyBlue wordpress theme. I widget and tag enabled this theme, and updated it to run on 2.3.2.
Is there a vision you have that you want turned into a website? Talk to me, and let me turn your dreams into web reality.
Technorati Tags: Custom WordPress Theme, Horror Novelist Website, Horror Web Design
