Archive for category Wordpress
Choosing a Wordpress Theme: Part 2 – Blog, Magazine, or Portfolio Design Pattern?
Posted by Todd Toler in Wordpress on June 30th, 2009
There are literally hundreds of Wordpress themes available, a number which seems to be growing faster than anyone can keep up with. Fortunately, most of them fall into a few basic interaction design patterns. An understanding of what these patterns are and how they differ will make it easier to identify the right theme to begin a project with. To distinguish this from other Wordpress theme categorization schemes out there, I’m grouping all themes into three major categories based on the way an information architect might think about it. It is important not to get too distracted by the visual design(e.g. colors and graphics) or content-type specialty (e.g. text, video, photo) of a pre-built theme – at least, at first. The look of things and the messaging and positioning of a theme is much easier to change than the basic flow between elements, how the navigation, pages and sidebars are laid out, which features are deployed and in what way.
Blog Themes
Magazine Themes
Portfolio Themes
Tim Ferriss Gives Solid State Blogging Tips
Posted by Todd Toler in Wordpress on June 27th, 2009
Author of The 4 Hour Work Week – and therefore a deserving hero to us all – Tim Ferriss gives a very useful presentation full of practical tips for successful blogging. I was most impressed by the advice on establishing an efficient writing and editing process, which let’s face it – is the most time consuming aspect of blogging and where most of us fall over. Tim also demonstrates committment to a very Solid State UX principle – which is to always test your assumptions, then make small tweaks until you optimize your user’s experience. He shares some fascinating click stream data and insights collected from his own blog. From San Francisco WordCamp 2009: Approx. 50 min
Choosing a Wordpress Theme: Part 1 – Premium, Custom, or Free?
Posted by Todd Toler in Wordpress on June 26th, 2009
Photo Credit: Eric Flexyourhead
Wordpress can be used to pull off just about any type of website these days, and clearly the magic of this platform lies in the vast proliferation of pre-designed themes, plug-ins, & widgets. Choosing a theme – which is the single largest determinant of a site’s look, feel, and organization – can be a confusing process. If you’re hacking together a site yourself, don’t overemphasis the way the theme looks – at least on the surface. After all, you can always tweak the basic feel of things, swapping out your own graphics, colors, and images with just a little hunting and pecking around the theme’s file structure and a few basic style-sheet tweaks. Far more important are the basic information architecture and functionality choices the theme designer made – because let’s face it – you’ll be locked into these unless you really know your way around the code. Most Wordpress theme choosing advice is focused on practical tips – e.g. Is it Widget Ready? But let’s step back and focus on the overall quality of the design, assuming we can tweak the little things we don’t like about it later. To help make sense of it all, I’m proposing a simple taxonomy of types of Wordpress themes to help with the decision-making process.
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