Practicum post #4: Look & Feel

Obviously, I wanted my homepage to look different than the preset "Motion" theme. First off, the preset theme had a very dark feel—not exactly what I wanted to go for. So, the first step was changing the background image. I dug through my photo library and found an image of some mountains from Italy:

Then I cropped it in Photoshop and did some subtle color correction to make the whole thing fade into a single color, which would then become the background for my blog and the basis for the rest of the design choices:

One of the elements I chose to keep from the previous design were the transparent blog headers. However, I wanted an opaque color for the blog posts, and eventually settled on a pure white. The default thumbnail logo would have fit really well, actually, with my layout, but I wanted to make the entire thing as original as I could. Given the nature of my blog (multimedia) I decided to use an image of a radio tower—I designed it myself in Adobe Illustrator.

Because I didn't create the template in the first place, the act of changing the general look site was actually a really good way to help me understand how it was built, and how the different parts work together. Each sidebar, textbox, header, etc., tended to be controlled by some different bit of code. In order to change that in any significant way, I had to delve into the code and figure out how to do it.

Especially for someone with very little prior experience with HTML, the "dynamically related" PHP files were a bit of a doozy to figure out. Each piece of the website pointed to some other part which pointed to another... in order to modify something, I often had to do quite a bit of searching to figure out what exactly was controlling that element to begin with.

I spent a particularly long time going through the site and adjusting color, width, spacing, etc., at this point early on, but I've never really stopped. It's been an ongoing process of discovery. I'll find something wrong, or maybe just change my mind about how it should look, and I'll have to go in and change it. No matter how long I run the site, I don't think that'll ever stop.

(On This image, note the radio tower in top left, and the mountains in the background)