Blink and you’ll miss it

Posted on November 21, 2006
Filed Under blog, design, interweb, the future | 4 Comments

I’m thinking of changing the wordpress theme of this blog from squible to qwilm2! Hey presto! Here’s a clean install of the qwilm2! theme.

Currently, I’m using the squible wordpress theme by Theron Parlin and James Carppe. Their homepage is not really that inspiring but it is a solid CMS platform that allows for extended blogging. By that, I mean you can publish your music, photo’s, books, links, etc, in addition to traditional text-based blogging in a neat compact interface. The downsides are…

– The presentation is not good, particularly the font sizes and colour scheme. I’ve tried to modify it but it’s proven difficult.
– Support is not great (but see below!). That’s okay because I guess it’s only a hobby/sideline for the two designers. I’d pay for support but there doesn’t seem to be a medium/large community behind the theme so it probably won’t develop too much.
– Most internet (people) browsers don’t scroll down the page and see what’s at the bottom. They’re too dialled-in to the traditional blog presentation where the ‘goodies’ or extra information is on the side panels.
– Comments are too distant from the actual post so it’s not reader-friendly. Blind people would probably have a hard time ‘reading’ my blog but I haven’t delved into it too much at all.
– It’s extemely customisable but there’s no idiot’s guide!

The qwilm2! theme just looks nice. Here’s the home page and a nice example (with photos) from filledIN. Plus, I really like the co-designer’s site, although it doesn’t seem to have any photos and the colours suck (sorry!).

First impressions:

– Very nice layout, esp. Lokesh’s
– Widget-ised & customisable
– No documentation, no wiki, no community that I can find, and the helpsite is in Spanish (see above).
– How will it handle my photos? I ‘think’ they might be pushing the sidebar elements to the bottom of the page but I can’t be sure.
– Do I want to start digging through CSS scripts again?
– Note to self: how does it handle comments?
– How will it handle my categories as tag clouds? This is a problem in the clean install.

Here’s a tiny theme I really like but it wouldn’t suit me right now. And here’s a real-life example, maura.com, that’s, well, just cooool. I really like the minimalism because it encourages me to dig deeper into her site. Sadly, most internet (people) browsers are not like that, at all, at all, at all.

Right now, I’m thinking I’ll leave it up for a few days and see how I feel about it. Comments, as always, are welcome. Apologies in advance if I don’t reply quickly because tomorrow and next Monday are my only days in Dublin until Tues, 5th Dec. Damn, it’s slightly scary when you write it down like that! isadub vanishes into a sometimes-a-dub.

Comments