this woman’s work

It looks good in Firefox on my Mac and even better (unbelievable I know) on my son’s PC. Because Julia gets all yelling about it, I always keep the same white and the same header and the same general color scheme. But the old theme had some issues:

• No bulleted lists, which made posts like this challenging.
• Problems with navigation so that people couldn’t really dig in the archives.

Also these magazine themes do all kinds of nifty things. Most of those nifty things don’t work with a typical blog (I don’t use the feature box even though I wish I could justify it and I don’t use enough pics although that’s changing starting NOW — at least when I can remember to do it) but I’ve become enamored with custom sidebars for different sections and have been coding a lot of client sites by hand to allow it. This theme lets me do it with widgets so, say, on the Tag archives pages I can list more tags in the sidebar. I’m sure I’ll be messing more with sidebars as I go.

Oh and this theme has widgetized forms below the content, which I can’t really use on the front page but I’m going to mess with on other pages.

Sometimes a really good wordpress theme makes me want to create content to fit the theme just so I can use it with all of its bells and whistles. It’s one reason it’s fun to have clients who have needs way more complicated than my own — I just love to play with Wordpress.

Speaking of clients, I have a blog talk to give tonight for Digital Eve. I need to look at my handout and see if it needs tweaking because it probably does.

I wanted to use the new/old header graphic. And I wanted to play with wordpress themes. That’s the real reason we started Open Book Strategies — so I could play with wordpress themes! Speaking of which, I need to get to work!

I got this theme because I like the tabs in my sister’s new theme up at the top in the sidebar. Problem is, if you have blogher ads, they want their ads above the fold at the top of the menu, which means that I had to put the tabs down at the bottom of the sidebar and the theme didn’t like that. I couldn’t get the tabs to play nice. So here I changed out my theme to get the tabs and then had to scrap it because of the tabs. Such is the blogging life.

But the sidebars are so much cleaner than my last theme that I’m going to leave them. And I like the social bookmarking bar at the bottom.

My archives seem to have gone missing and two different plugins haven’t fixed it so I put a drop-down menu (both categories and dated archives) over in the sidebar. And I put my About Me page back up (with a pic of the kids and Brett from a few years ago). I’d like to have a more recent one but my “no faces” criteria is making it tricky. And my camera won’t upload or something so I can’t get a new one at the moment. Eventually. Meanwhile looking at the Destin shores is not a bad thing.

I love wordpress themes. I wish I could play with them all the dang time.