Torn Elements

I ditched my original idea of stripping down the default WordPress theme in favour of a pre-made blank theme. What can I say? Several hours of code ripping just didn’t appeal to me at all. I’m more interested in building than reverse engineering at this point.

I’d rather spend my time with graphics and layout than basic typography. With a blank theme you’re given all the required basics. A perfect starting point.

So I hit Google and came across Refueled.Net offering a few styles of blank themes. I’m a big fan of the right sidebar so I grabbed the appropriate layout.

Since I want to optimize for a 1024px layout I had to make a few changes. The theme and header image were optimized for 800px layout so I simply removed the image for now. We’ll put it back later.

Changes to style.css:

• Made some changes to optimize for 1024px width.
• Adjusted the width of the top menu as well as the sidebar to reflect the above change.
• Decreased the height of the header from 160px to 100px. Too big for what I have in mind.

Below are the code snippets of the changes:

#container {
    width: 970px; /*[Changed from 760px]*/
    margin: 0 auto;
    padding: 6px;
    background:#fff;
    color:#333;
    border: 1px solid #0B1224;
    }

#header {
    background: #DDD;
    width: 100%; /*[Changed from 760px]*/
    color: #fff;
    height: 100px; /*[Changed from 160px]*/
    }

#header h1{
    font-family: palatino linotype, georgia, arial, times;
    font-size: 16pt;
    font-weight: 300;
    letter-spacing: 1px;
    margin: 0;   
    padding: 40px 0 0 16px;   /*[Changed from 120]*/
    }

#menu {
    background: #0B1224;
    font-family: verdana, arial, times, serif;
    font-size: 8pt;
    width:100%; /*[Changed from 760]*/
    height:25px;
    border-top: 1px solid #fff;
}

#content {
    float: left;
    width: 680px; /*[Changed from 72%]*/
    overflow: hidden;
    }   

#sidebar {
    font-family: verdana, arial, tahoma;
    font-size:8pt;
    width: 280px; /*[Changed from 200px]*/
    float:right;
    margin: 12px 0 24px 0;
    padding: 0;
    border-left: 1px dotted #A2A2A2;
    }

You can click the images to see both in action.

Now that I have my desired width and a general layout I can start envisioning some graphics. I’m not the best graphic artist in the world so it might be a few days before I post on this topic again. Remember, I also work for a living.

Themes Coding, Themes, WordPress