My Journey to WordPress — New Design Up!

As I already explained pre­vi­ously, on April 5^th (2010), I migrated pix​e​lyzed​.com from another blog­ging plat­form to WordPress. Last night I changed from the free theme I’d been using to my own new design which I inte­grated into WordPress using the Thesis theme (more about Thesis below).

As you can see, the new design is quite min­i­mal com­pared to the old pix​e​lyzed​.com design. It is also a work in progress and will prob­a­bly evolve and change a lot more often now that this site is run­ning on a more solid plat­form. For now, only the header and nav­i­ga­tion are “final”. I still have to tweak the rest of the site’s typog­ra­phy and the lay­out of the index page’s list­ing of posts. I also want to tweak the lay­out of post pages as well as sta­tic pages. Finally, I want to add back some of the great inter­ac­tiv­ity my tem­po­rary theme had (Mystique).

You may also notice that many of my pic­tures that were in the old gallery sec­tion now appear on rota­tion in the side­bar. I may build a ded­i­cated gallery page/​section again but that is not in my imme­di­ate plans. At this time, I pre­fer to con­cen­trate on tweak­ing the design and adding new good con­tent. There will be lots to talk about in the next few weeks… Right now, I’m writ­ing this post as I wait with antic­i­pa­tion for the new Adobe CS5 launch event…

The Thesis Theme Framework

Ok, now what about that Thesis theme? For those who may won­der, Thesis is what they call a WordPress “theme frame­work”. Unlike most free themes peo­ple know, theme frame­works are designed as flex­i­ble foun­da­tions for your own designs (or child themes) into WordPress. Most themes are “tweak-​able” by end users but none to the extent of a true theme frame­work. Some of these are also free and you can see a list on the WordPress Codex “theme frame­work” page.

Thesis on the other hand is also what they call a Premium theme and it was rec­om­mended to me by a good friend of mine. After work­ing with it a few days, I must say that it is very pow­er­ful and quite easy to work with, espe­cially for some­one like me who’s not afraid to dive into code. Thesis is quite developer-​centric and, to get the most out of it, you will need to know CSS and be able to add some PHP code. Both are done to “cus­tom” files, away from both the theme and WordPress core files. There’s even an edi­tor in the theme’s ded­i­cated admin sec­tion that lets you work with these files directly online with­out the need to fire up Dreamweaver or your code edi­tor of choice.

Thesis is a very solid theme but, on the other hand, it’s not the only game in town either. The other “star” in the pre­mium theme world is a theme called Headway. I haven’t tried it yet but I must say that, if I’d known about it before pur­chas­ing Thesis, I prob­a­bly would have cho­sen Headway. Why? Because it is a theme frame­work aimed more at design­ers but which is also very pow­er­ful and flex­i­ble. I want to con­cen­trate on the design and con­tent of the blog now and not on writ­ing code… I do enough of that on my client projects

What Next?

Working with WordPress and being the geek that I am means that I need to improve my PHP skills to be able to under­stand this new new blog­ging plat­form which also extends well into the world of CMS soft­ware… some­thing I also have a need for now. I am also cur­rently work­ing on my first client project where I use PHP exclu­sively on the back end so mov­ing to WordPress now felt like the right thing to do. So, for this site, expect more WordPress related posts in addi­tion to the stuff I usu­ally talk about.

In the next few weeks I will also migrate my com­pany blogs (there are sep­a­rate French and English ver­sions) to WordPress and I might do that with Headway that time so I can com­pare the two “head to head” (no pun intended!) After that I can make a real assess­ment of both and prob­a­bly post reviews here.

On this site, expect the design to evolve and for me to blog about the new CS5 release. I just fin­ished watch­ing the lauch pre­sen­ta­tion and I already have a few things to say (like the com­plete absence of Fireworks in the pre­sen­ta­tion for exam­ple). Now that I own Camtasia Studio, I will try to pub­lish tuto­ri­als again but in video for­mat. They should be quicker to cre­ate than writ­ing and prob­a­bly more fun to follow.

So expect to hear more from me than in pre­vi­ous months as I work hard to bring back this site to life and pro­vide use­ful infor­ma­tion and tips to my readers.

Thanks for read­ing and glad to have you here!