New Pibbit Theme

Whew! So it took me about 2 months to come up with the design, break it down, implement it, do the art for it (while working, having a social life, and still gaming!). I wanted to record all my trials and tribulations during the struggle, but it got very tedious and would’ve prolonged process, so I scrapped it. Instead, I’ll give you the quick summary.

Quadruple Blue Theme

So Quadruple Blue was my theme in the beginning. Can you tell my favorite color is blue?

However…I felt the calendar on the sidebar was unnecessary, and having three columns made the content-column unnecessarily smooshed and skinny. If I uploaded an image that was just a little bit wide, it broke the theme. In fact, that’s what happened, which is what caused me to want my own theme.

And after a while, I realized I didn’t like blue…THAT much.

Sandbox Theme

I was lazy - I didn’t want to strip away the design, I wanted a WordPress theme that was empty, bare bones. So I found the The Sandbox Theme.

This theme allows you to customize your site to use 2- or 3-columns, left, center, or right. It was minimalistic, and it suited my needs.

Then came the tediousness. I had a crash course in CSS from w3schools.com, CSS positioning, as well as various other sites. There were a lot of details to learn.

Through it all, it is VERY necessary to have Firefox and the Firebug plugin. With Firebug, troubleshooting CSS is a lot faster. You are able to inspect other sites to see how they accomplish their effects with a simple right-click -> Inspect Element.

It’s important to test your progress by looking at other browsers. Currently, I know I have an issue with the header in IE6. Browsershots.org offers handy screen-shot services, but has been at times, slow, difficult to use.

Another handy tool is Test Everything, which validates your CSS, HTML, SEO level, etc.

Pibbit Theme

It’s been a long difficult journey, but I’m happy with the results. I came up with PHP code to randomly load the images of gaming ladies in the upper-right corner, and it is actually based on time.

The Pibbit header inspiration came when I was driving during dusk and happened to look out the window to see silhouette of trees behind a nice gradient of blue -> orange yellow.

Anyways, I look forward to relaxing right now. It really felt like I was given a lump of clay and had to mold and sculpt and cut and fix….there are a lot of details going into tweaking with themes! Hats off to all WordPress theme developers!