If you like the new design here at WebsiteBuildingBiz, you’ll have to thank the author of the Defusion theme, Webdemar.
Anyone who has been lurking around here might have noticed that I’ve gone through about four visual designs in about the last two months, but I think I’ve got something I can work with for a while now.
When I saw Defusion I knew it was providing a lot of what I was looking for, but it wasn’t quite right for me. Here’s what I did if you want to make some modifications to go from this to something more like I’m using now.
Table of Contents
Larger Fonts, More Contrast
This is almost a universal problem with WordPress themes, in my humble opinion. I like big text, maybe just because I’m half blind, but I spend a lot of time reading each day and its quite a bit easier on the eyes. On the theme of being blind, I also went with a black font over the dark gray. I need some contrast or my eyes will start to fall asleep and start imagining things!
Trim the Sidebar
I took off about 25% of the sidebar’s width, but I didn’t expand the content area. This gives a little bit more seperation, and a little bit more emphasis on the content over the navigation.
Trade the Background Image for a Header
The wave-looking background image just wasn’t doing it for me, and I wanted a header that could add some color instead. So I headed over to stock.xchange to look for something that fit the Website Building Biz theme. And I think I found the perfect one, thanks to a photographer/designer by the name of Jan Kratena who publishes a website at Bestof.cz.
Now, while stock.xchange provides a free license to use the images posted there, it isn’t without limits. So unfortunately, I can’t re-package my modifications to the theme for redistribution – at least not without getting a few more levels of permission first.
Big RSS
The original theme had a small RSS button up in the header, but it was pretty small (again, I’m practially blind). I like the big orange icon, but I kind of want to get it back up where it was before, in the header itself. The sidebar/widget location is probably going to be temporary.
Footer
When I changed the font colors and made links dark blue, they basically vanished into the background of the footer. So I made the footer gray, and it kind of blends as the place where the content and the background come together. I’m not sure about the divs in there, and I’m having a hard time orienting the text to where I want.
Thanks to those who did the real work
I just made these few little modifications. The hard coding was done by Webdemar, I just wanted to optimize some superficial aspects for people like me who spend a lot of time reading technical stuff with bad eyes. The header looks awesome, and that is completely thanks to Jan Kratena’s great graphical skills.
Do you love it? Hate it?
Let me know what you think about my modified interpretation of the Defusion WordPress theme!
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