New Site Design

Early last week I uploaded my new site design for DanBirlew.com. My custom theme is running on WordPress 3.3.1 and is hand-coded in HTML 5. Inspirations for the design include GameInformer.com and the Black Sakura WordPress theme. I created the theme offline by installing WordPress on my computer, running it under XAMPP. I learned a great deal about developing WordPress themes in the process, and expect my future development time to run shorter and smoother in my future WP themes.

Please view the site in ANYTHING except Internet Explorer for the full experience. While I made serious attempts to recreate the styling of the site in IE, all filters applied failed miserably to achieve the same shadows and font presentation. Internet Explorer’s relation to Microsoft not only makes it a target of frequent security attacks and trojans, but the browser itself stubbornly refuses to adopt webkit standards that make web development easy and pleasurable for virtually all other browsers. Adopting a more secure and web developer-friendly browser like Google Chrome is sure to make your internet experiences more enjoyable. The site has not been tested on Opera.

I’ve been chasing down errors and styling quirks for the past week. The final step included upgrading the forums to the newest version of Vanilla and creating a version of my theme for that program. Unfortunately integrating Vanilla back into WordPress proved somewhat challenging when their provided plugins didn’t work at first, but luckily I have just enough PHP knowledge (by which I mean, the minimum amount) to rectify the disconnect and show the latest forum postings on the main page. I’m quite pleased with the final result.

The only other glitch in the site left is that my popup jQuery gallery is no longer working. But that was also a plugin, and if they don’t get it working with HTML 5 soon I can just switch to another.

If you’re interested in my web development abilities or need a custom WordPress theme, please contact me. Meanwhile, I guess it’s time to start working on the next theme for this site!

Tags: site design, updates, web development