So it’s been a while since I last wrote about the WordPress theme that I’m designing. A lot has happened since then, and progress is slowly but surely being made. Here’s some highlights (and you can see a functioning demo here):
Category Pages: These are now coming together and should be done before the end of this week. To get an idea of where I’m going check out the completed Journalism landing page. I’m trying to bring photos, video, and outside links into each category page. In addition, I’ve stuck with narrow columns for the article to try and take advantage of the width of the space. To me this seems to be the best method for fitting a lot of content into the the top part of a page.
Restyled Footer & Sidebar: The footer is now restyled along with the Search bar and the left-hand sidebar. The sidebar is definitely not even close to done, but hopefully some help from the very talented Andrew Witherspoon will fix that. The footer though now makes use of some plugins, embedded pdfs, and provides space to browse by month, category, or search.
Images on the homepage: The featured content slider is now functioning on the homepage and there’s more where that came from. The page also pulls image thumbnails if they exist as well as the most recent video post and the most popular posts (as decided by votes, not pageviews). This is another step along the line of making the homepage more engaging, and interactive. It’s still got a long way to come, but I think it’s a good start.
Still to come in the coming weeks are slight updates to article pages, tag pages, search pages, and the sidebars underneath the ad portion of articles. I’ll also be experimenting with plugins (like the weather one in the sidebar) to see what works and what doesn’t. I’d love to hear whay you think and what needs to be changed.