Solo Technology

It bugs me that my “main” Solo Technology site never has the same look and feel as my blogs. After much work this weekend, it still doesn’t — but it’s much closer to the direction I think I’m headed.

I’m not a Web Designer. I’m just a mechanic, so to speak. So my original plan to “clean-sheet” design a new template for all of my sites went out the window after much dabbling and wasted time. It’s really not that the CSS and xhtml are all that difficult. The problem lies in that I struggle to generate a vision of what I want the site to look like and how I want it to behave (navigation, etc.). Do I hope to get to that point someday? You bet. But probably not for a while…

Not to mention all the debate between fixed and liquid design. Ugh. I’ve used both. I’ve built both. I tend to prefer liquid, where the web page scales to fill the browser window. Yet, with very high resolutions, that can make an article have insanely long lines, thus clobbering readability.

Fixed, however, seems (to me) to waste a lot of space at those same high resolutions. But fixed can really help nail down where elements are going to be on a page, thus keeping content very consistent and predictable.

And that’s as far as I’ll go on that topic. There’s an endless variety of online discussions, forums and pages discussing the same topic. If there’s a clear consensus, I’ve sure missed it.

Ultimately, I ended up crawling the Open Source Web Design and Open Web Design sites. Both sites have tons of open-source templates, free for the use. There’s a lot of overlap in templates between the two, but it usually is a good idea to check each.

After much debate, I chose a template I liked called Aqueous by Six Shooter Media. Doing my main site is easy enough, but I was a bit nervous about how to convert it to a WordPress theme. As I was pondering that, I learned that the WordPress Station site already had a version of this template converted to WP theme up and running!

I’ve exchanged some emails with Bishop Blog Works (he did the conversion to a WP theme) and we’re planning a collaborative effort to tidy up what he’s started and get the theme into a position that it can be offered for general release. Exciting stuff and I look forward to some learning experiences.

Long story short: The main site here at Solo Technology is primarily done. And it even validates. I simplified and reduced the static content and utilized feedburner and del.icio.us feeds to pull in dynamic content to help keep the dust from settling. All in all, it was great fun to put together and quite a bit smaller than it used to be. Heck, all the “content” is here in the blog for now.

Starting this month I look forward to working with the WordPress version of that template. That’ll cover phase 2 (converting this blog) and phase 3 (migrating the personal blog). Time frame? Unknown, but I sure look forward to getting everything consistent.

And hey, if you have thoughts on liquid vs. fixed design, feel free to leave a comment before I get too deep into this conversion!

2 Responses to “Face Lift: Phase 1 almost complete”

1. Michael on December 22nd, 2006 1:11 am
   

   I haven’t forgotten about you! I just did some more work on the theme, and will get you a copy of what I’ve got (cleaned up of ad/stat code) in the next few days.

2. » pingback » Face Lift: Phase 2 » Solo Technology on December 30th, 2006 12:59 pm
   
   

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