I’ve been looking for a new theme for my blog recently. I want something simple, with few distracting graphics or bright colors. I also want a theme that adjusts itself to the width of the browser window. After playing around with several themes, I finally settled on the blog.txt theme. It bills itself as a “minimalist” theme:
Blog.txt is a theme for WordPress designed to impact your content in the most minimal way: using whitespace as a major design element, guiding the reader to the content.
I like the overall effect of this theme. It makes good use of whitespace, which is vastly undervalued by many web designers.
I did have to make a couple of modifications to the stylesheet. The <em> tag was making text bold, and the <strong> tag was making text BOLD AND UPPERCASE. Both of these behaviors are incorrect; they should be italic and bold, respectively. (I still tend to use <i> and <b> for italic and bold anyway, as I don’t buy the “semantics” argument against <i> and <b>. I intuitively know what italicized or bolded text means, and I don’t need another set of tags to provide that concept.)
I also made the Comment field a little wider, as it was about the size of a postage stamp.
I’m debating about the ALL CAPS headlines, but interestingly it does look a bit cleaner than Mixed Case headlines, so I’m going to leave it alone for now.
WordPress 2.2’s Widgets are quite handy. I installed the Folding Pages Widget from Navy Road Software, so that my Contents (actually a listing of WordPress pages) aren’t fully expanded on the home page. WordPress’ built-in Widgets are handling the rest of the sidebar. Much nicer than hand-editing php code!
I may eventually throw a bit of subtle color into the theme, but I don’t want to go overboard and overwhem the “minimalist” feel. I would like to incorporate my previous headline pic, though.
Tags: misfeature, software, web, widget, wordpress