The Joy of Customization: arthemia2

I think arthemia and arthemia2 were the first magazine style WordPress themes I came across that caused me to imagine a variety of customized configurations to implement on several websites I had that had been languishing and were badly in need of being transformed.

Since 1996, I’d had two very popular websites on a single domain. In 2008, I decided it was time to clear up the focus of those sites, and finally update them from the hand-rolled HTML sites they’d been stuck on since 2003.

When it came to redesigning wildhorse.com, I wanted to refocus the site to my original idea: equine art and artists, news about wild horse preservation and about equine rescue efforts. That meant that I needed to split off the very popular Miami Vice related content off onto it’s own site, and could not put that task off any longer.

First up was redesigning wildhorse.com to be The Wild Horse. Copying the old HTML listings and converting them to WordPress articles was the easy part, but I spent about a week rearranging the categories several times, just because I wasn’t completely happy with the old designations I’d used. The new site has been up for months, and I’m still tweaking. Redoing the images, and going through all of the old artists links to see what sites are still working and what sites need to be removed from the artists directory is an ongoing task at this point, but the new wildhorse.com launched on August 1, 2008, and has had a pretty decent reception. It’s still going to take a while to get the traffic back up to where it was back in 2003-2004, but that’s for another article.

Next up was creating Miami Vice Chronicles. Setting up the site was a snap, and customizing Arthemia Free was a lot easier and a lot more fun than I’d originally anticipated. But it took nearly two months to convert the several hundred individually hand-rolled HTML pages for the Episode Guide, the Music Guide, the cast information, and the old news and articles into Wordpress articles! Add in the time it took to rework or rescan many of the images (I’d used lower resolution images back in the days before broadband), and the project I’d started in September was finally ready to launch in December. Being the Miami Vice fan that I am, I chose to launch the new site on Dec 15, which is Don Johnson’s birthday.

Since there isn’t a ton of new Miami Vice related news coming out these days, blogging is occasional, but it’s the episode guide and music guide that are the big draw, and I’m hoping the new design and layout of the image galleries and listings still appeal to both the casual and die-hard fan.

Note: the links to both arthemia and arthemia2 download the same theme code, but the first link contains some helpful instructions that are not included in the second link, thus the reason for including both links.

Site: The Wild Horse
Site: Miami Vice Chronicles
Theme: arthemia2 (since renamed Arthemia Free)