I have been playing around with the idea of updating my blog theme, or giving it a facelift for a few weeks now due to the fact that I had hacked my old theme pretty heavily testing various plugins, etc. I didn’t really want to go for anything drastic in terms of design because I have been pretty content w/ the overall design and layout so I basically pulled from two different themes that I really liked and more or less made my own.
I started with a free theme that Brian Gardner had on his blog a little while back called Shades of Blue, and the theme that I had used a while back called Angelic Design. I also got creative in Photoshop, something I haven’t done in a long time, and came up with my custom header background to blend with the overall theme. The total time it took me to roll out this custom theme was about 30 minutes. Granted, I already had an idea as to what I was wanting the end product to look like before I got started but I was pretty pleased that it turned out as well as it did in such a short period of time.
One of the advantages to this new theme that I am using is that in addition to the sidebar being widgeted, I also have 4 widget areas that I can drop content into on the footer. I haven’t decided yet what widgets I will run there yet, but it’s going to come in handy because I am always running out of sidebar area…
Thanks for the suggestion of “shades of blue” template. It was just what I was looking for on my new personal site. http://www.claytoncavaness.com
Awesome Clayton, thanks for mentioning NascarView too!!!
Hi 🙂
I am also working on a theme based on Shades-Of-Blue
You’ve done a clean job here – but to me the tweetie bird is too big