Niles Gibbs has a new theme

Last night I updated the theme on Niles Gibbs. All in all, I’m rather satisfied with the result.

Usually, as I mentioned in the first post, I design a site’s layout and design before I start adding content. This time I decided to dive right in, and I’m happy that I did.

I toyed with the idea of using a free theme from WordPress Themes, but not only could I not find what I was looking for, but every theme has a link to the theme’s designer somewhere on the page.

I’m not against giving credit where credit is due, I just like having a site of my own design. But, part of designing your own theme from scratch means a lot of XHTML/CSS gruntwork.

So, remembering css Zen Garden, I decided to use the classic WordPress theme (not the Kubrick inspired default, which I think is overused) and set out to look for alternate stylesheets.

I found Alex King’s WordPress CSS Styles, which fit the bill perfectly! I finally chose the 2nd place winner, Rubric, as a starting point.

Then, with about half an hour of tweaking both the classic theme’s XHTML and the new CSS (and borrowing the lovely gecko macroshot, from jules:g), a simple and clean theme emerged.

So far I think that everything is working the way that it’s supposed to, but I’ll continue to tweak it as I find problems.