Sam Cooke - Thinkbox- NZ
In recent years the number of themes has exploded. On the main WordPress theme repository alone there are “1,515 THEMES, with 45,581,689 downloads, and counting”.
Sam from thinkbox in Featherston will be talking us through his checklist of how to tell themes apart, what makes some good, some great and some not.
For non WordPress users the theme is the design part that glues the back (database) and front end ( menus & visuals) of the website together.
A slightly more tech description would be a theme is part code & part graphics or a bunch of cascading stylesheets, some php and other code types ( esp. JS for menus ) and other web browser specific tweaks.
Most users tend to look at the overall layout. For example – Does the theme have a header, footer and columns combo that they like? Wireframing is a key part of the theme road mapping process.
On the other hand depending upon resources many users will use an off the shelf free theme with a small amount of customisation for their branding and maybe fonts. The best practice way to do this is to use a child theme approach.
In the mid range there are premium themes which all seems to be dominated by sliders and things that would annoy even some flash designers:) So how to pick one of them and how to change it to suit – that is the theme challenge.
At the higher end; a custom theme where literally anything is possible and it’s back to wireframing, PSD’s, slice to code and convert to WordPress templates and usually a framework (options setup) of some kind to make the back end management easier.
As well as the checklist Sam will zone in on ” theming”, “theme anatomy”, “WP as CMS”, “making it cool for your customers”and other aspects of theme wrangling.
This talk will be suited for all users – especially new ones and WordPress.com users who now have a great deal of theme and styling flexibility compared to the recent past.
So what kind of themes does Sam work on? Here are 4 of his recent projects
- http://www.escarpment.co.nz/
- http://www.livinglegends.co.nz/
- http://www.mobilizemail.com/
- http://www.lecordonbleu.co.nz/
