The Joy of Customization

Over the past year, I think I’ve become addicted to customizing WordPress themes.

I have an idea in my head about how I want some of my sites to look like, but I’ve never seen one theme that had all the components or layout areas that I’d imagined. I’d always want one idea from one theme, and another idea from a second theme, and a tweak of an idea from yet another theme.

Isn’t that’s how Dr. Frankenstein started out… or was that Dr. Moreau…

I’ve never had the inclination to write a theme from scratch… as far as I’m concerned, I’ve still got a lot to learn about CSS. But I can read the code, and I know what to change and how to change it to get the look that I want. The same thing goes for tweaking the PHP framework of the themes.

Over the past six months or so, my favorites for customizing have been arthemia2 by Michael Jubel, and the Revolution Two themes (which are no longer free, alas). I had fun with Mimbo2, with both Branford Magazine and Wynton Magazine, and also with the original Revolution themes that were purchased for the massive number of websites that fall under my other creative hat (more on that later).

I ended up using arthemia2 as a base on three consecutive sites. I found myself taking pieces from Revolution Two themes and plugging them into heavily customized Original Revolution themes. I’ve mixed and matched pieces from different themes to get close to a look that I could see in my mind, and sometimes it worked, and other times I had to scrap it and begin again. And in one case, my graphics design weakness became a challenge to sidestep.

But I’m going to continue to see what pieces from what themes I can mix and match into what new concoctions.

I may turn this into a series of what I customized and why, since there were so many that have fallen under the code tweaking knife.