- WordPress 2.8 Theme Design
- Tessa Blakeley Silver
- 1130字
- 2021-04-01 13:43:07
Things to consider
First up, before we start, I'll acknowledge that you probably already have a design idea in mind and would like to just start producing it. Chances are that unless you're learning theme development solely for yourself, you probably have a client or maybe a website partner who would like to have input on the design. If you have neither, congratulations!—you're your own client. Whenever you see me reference "the client", just switch your perspective from that of a "theme designer" to "website user".
At any rate, before you start working on that design idea, take a moment to start a checklist and really think about two things:
- What type of site/blog the theme is going to be applied to
- What, if any, plugins or widgets might be used within the theme
Types of blogs
Let's take a look at the following types of blogs (regular sites fit these types as well). These are not genres. Within these types of blog sites, you can apply any genre you can think of—horseback riding, cooking, programming, and so on.
You may be designing a theme for a specific site that has a targeted genre. You may want to make a generic theme that anyone can download and use. Still, if you target your theme to fit one of the types of blogs below, you might get more downloads of it just because it's more targeted. There's a reason why Brian Gardner's Revolution WordPress Theme is one of the top-rated themes for online news and magazine sites (http://www.revolutiontheme.com/). People who want to start a magazine or news blog know that this theme will work for their type of site. There's no need for them to look through dozens or even hundreds of more generic themes, wondering if they can modify them to accommodate their site.
Just read through the following blog types and notice which one of these types your theme fits into. Knowing this will help you determine how the content should be structured and how that might affect your theme's design.
- The professional expert site: This is an individual who blogs in their area of expertise to increase their personal exposure and standing. The type of design that can be applied to this site is diverse, depending on the type of expertise and what people's expectations are from that genre. For example, lawyers will have more people who are just content searchers; the cleaner and more basic the design, the better. Designers need to give the user a great visual experience in addition to the content. People in media might want to create a theme design that lends itself to listening to or viewing podcasts.
- The corporate blog: It's a company that blogs to reach customers and encourage closer relationships, sales, and referrals. Here, the user is actually a content searcher, so you might think a site that's simpler and focuses on text would do better. They just need the specific information about products and services, and maybe would like the opportunity to post a comment to a relevant blog post by the corporation. However, the corporation that is paying you to design the theme is really hoping to further engage the user with a great site experience and immerse them in their brand.
- Online news source/magazine: This is a blog that provides content on a particular topic, usually funded by ads. The design for this kind of site depends on how traditional the news content is or how appropriate the content is to put into a magazine. People looking for news and the latest updates in a genre might prefer theme designs that remind them of the experience of reading a newspaper, while magazine readers—especially for fashion, travel, people, and "bleeding-edge" technology—tend to like the site for the design experience of it as well as its content. Just pick up a paper version of any current news source or magazine and you will quickly become aware of what people in that genre are expecting.
- The Campaign Blog: These are the non-profit blogs run by charities or "causes". The information needs to be structured for clarity and winning people over to understanding and campaigning the cause or candidate. Most users will be content searchers and, while being appreciative of a nice and clean content structure and design experience depending on the campaign or cause, users may become critical if the site is too well designed. A user may think: "This is nice, but is it where they spend the money I donate, instead of on the cause!"
Keeping the above types of sites/blogs in mind, you can now think about your design idea and assess how appropriate it is for the type of blog or site, the kind of experience you want to give to users, as well as what you might think of the user's expectation about what the content and experience should be like.
Plugins and widgets
The second consideration you'll want to make is about plugins and widgets. Plugins are special files that make it easy to add extra functions and features to your WordPress site. Widgets are now built into WordPress 2+ and are basically things you can put into your WordPress site's sidebar, regardless of knowing any HTML or PHP.
Plugins and widgets usually place requirements on a theme. The theme should have basic API hooks in place so that it can take advantage of all a WordPress plugin may have to offer. Certain CSS classes may be generated and placed into the site for headers or special text areas; a template file in the theme might need some specific PHP code to accommodate a plugin.
In Chapter 3, we'll cover the most important API hooks that will make your theme play well with most WordPress plugins. However, you should find out the theme requirements of any plugin or widget that you plan to use so that you may accommodate it when you write code for your theme.
Note
What kinds of plugins are available?
You can see all the types of plugins available on the WordPress.org site, identifying them by their tags (http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/tags/).
Find out more about widgets:
You'll be able to see a sample of widgets, as well as find out the requirements for a widget compatible theme at http://widgets.wordpress.com/. This will walk you through "widgetizing" (we'll cover widgetizing our theme in Chapter 8).
When you begin working on your design, you'll want to compare your sketches and design comp(s) against your plugins and widgets checklist, and make sure you're accommodating them.
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