Epic Alex | WordPress Tutorials

The Unstandard WordPress Theme

On Wednesday, Derek at 5ThirtyOne made a modified version of his current theme available for download with the intention of “breaking the typical blog mold”. For me this was an exciting opportunity to see how he deals with his homepage. Instead of using the typical excerpt to display what the post is going to be about, images are used inline with the old maxim, “A picture speaks a thousand words”. It works well, the images work as a very good temptation to make the user click to read more.

Besides the layout, one of my favourite parts of the homepage is the overlay of the post title and comment count on the image. Unfortunately the semi-transparent overlay for the title uses invalid CSS, which is a shame, but is necessary to avoid all the extra problems incurred when trying to use transparent PNGs in browsers like IE6. Its also good to see the ‘image excerpt’ being used on other pages than just the homepage, like the archive and category pages. All too often the homepage of themes like this uses images in an ingenious way, only to revert back to a conventional post listing on other areas of the site.

To achieve this effect, the theme makes use of Custom Fields, which allow the theme to achieve more using images than simply placing one in a post. If you ever come to design a WordPress theme, then using Custom Fields will allow you to develop much more interesting layouts and placing of information.

Another aspect of this theme that I like is the colour scheme. Only grey and orange are used, and it is nearly all CSS based, which makes it very easy for the user to make the theme more personal very quickly. The only thing that would need editing elsewhere is the searchbox, which is an image, but you can do this in Paint or something like GIMP, which is free to download.

You can download the Unstandard Theme here.