Blog Theme

[Simon Thomas]

I think it's time we started looking for a theme for the group blog (I think we just need to start it up, get things going). So, does anyone have any suggestions for a theme that is currently out there that we can use and/or tweak?

Alternatively, we could design our own custom theme. I'm reasonably experienced when it comes to theme designing and I'm part way through doing one at the moment.

Personally, and this is all up for debate, I would like to see the following in a theme:
* Widget ready (so we can easily add/remove widgets without changing the code)
* Magazine style (a portal style front page that allows for highlighting content both within and external to the blog)
* Well structured - If we are going to use the blog to experiment, it would be good if we had code that was modular and well structured to it's easy to play around with

What do you all think? Have I missed out anything? Something we could do is list some of our favourite themes/sites here and take the best bits.

[Carter-Ann]

Simon, those are good points. How about we all list 4 favourite themes/sites and then we see if their are any common elements?

[Simon Thomas]

That's a good idea. The three articles below are a good place to start:
http://www.smashingmagazine.com/2007/08/28/45-excellent-blog-designs/
http://mashable.com/2007/10/12/30-sites-inspire-designs/
http://freelanceswitch.com/working/34-places-to-get-design-inspirat...

Personally, I like:
http://www.alistapart.com
http://www.haveamint.com
http://freelanceswitch.com/

When it comes to a color scheme, we could use Kuler to pick and/or tweak one.

For some free themes to get us started, these three posts have some really nice themes in them:
http://www.smashingmagazine.com/2007/06/26/21-fresh-usable-and-eleg...
http://www.smashingmagazine.com/2007/02/09/83-beautiful-wordpress-t...
http://www.smashingmagazine.com/2007/05/07/10-fresh-elegant-and-cle...

If we intend on creating a custom theme at a later date, I think it would be best to have a nice, but fairly simple theme. We'd want any readers to associate the blog & community with the custom theme, not a hugely distinctive freely available one. But that's just my opinion.

[Michele Martin]

Can we try to do a them that we could potentially recreate in some way here? I think from a branding perspective we'd want to have this space and the blog going together. We can get into the code, but that's beyond me. I'd need someone to help with that. Is it something you could do Simon?

[Simon Thomas]

That's a very good point actually Michele. I hadn't really considered cross branding it with here. Just looking at the ning options, you can edit the CSS so, in theory, you could make one look like the other, but the wordpress blog can be customised much more than the ning space. So it would be easier to make the blog look like ning rather than the other way round. The only thing that worries me slightly about that, is we would be limiting what we ca do with the blog because of the limitations of ning. Having things like the same header image, colours and fonts would be relatively easy though.

[Carter-Ann]

Also if we can't have exactly matching layouts/themes etc, we could think about having a logo or strong banner (like the one on this ning at the moment) that would help unify the blog and ning site, helping sure the brand image.

[Simon Thomas]

How about we draw up a list of sites we like, then we can start to think about coming up with a design that uses the best elements of those sites. When we come up with a concept, we can have a look to see what can be applied to the blog and what can be applied here. Then we can look at compromises of the concept and just evolve it until it works in both places.

Michele, I tried to reply to your post but I accidentally deleted it, I think. I'm not sure whether I've deleted it for everyone or just for me. I don't know why the delete button and the replay button are right next to each other! Do you think you could reply again, providing I have deleted it for everyone, which I didn't mean to do. Oops.

[Michele Martin]

I just added it below--basically I'm saying that I'm open to changing whatever we need to here. Basically what you just said. :-)

[Michele Martin]

I'm open to changing whatever we need to here. I'm thinking that we start with Wordpress and see what they have and then how we might be able to incorporate those elements here. At a minimum I'm assuming we can use the same header and colors.

[Carter-Ann]

http://www.emanuelblagonic.com/
http://www.alistapart.com
http://www.valuewit.com
http://www.vox.com/explore/

The last one is the main Vox page. I've only just discovered Vox and really like the layouts and themes they offer. Though I might through that in there.

[Michele Martin]

Simon--I'm interested in playing around with some of the more interesting plug-ins. Like the sticky widget mentioned here--I'm curious to see how that worked. Is there a list of other Wordpress plugins to refer to?

[Simon Thomas]

We could do a similar thing to the approach for the themes, in that we get a list together of plugins everyone would like to try out. That sticky RSS one looks interesting. I use a plugin that appends a footer to the RSS content, but that's general and doesn't change.

Are there any others you would like to try out?

[Michele Martin]

I don't know what's available. I'll have to do a little research.