Good effort, but to be honest the design is rather dated. There are problems with adaptive / responsive design of the theme as it doesn’t work properly on small windows sizes.
Thanks, premiumwp. But can you be more specific?
— What makes it ‘dated’? I indeed didn’t want it to look like every other theme out there, but neither did I use heavy graphical backgrounds for example.
— What size breaks it? I shrunk the window down pretty far and also tried it on a low-rez monitor running an old version of Windows, and it still held together.
I guess good design is a subjective, personal thing. The textured background, thin widget headers, unstyled typography and rounded corners make it feel a bit dated for me. But that’s just my opinion.
Yes it scales down to about 800px but no smaller than that. So it doesn’t adapt to display properly on smartphones etc which is what’s needed in a true responsive layout.
All the best
Thanks again. Per smartphones, I don’t think there are many designs that shrink that far; they almost always use a separate theme. The wpTouch plugin is free and does a great job for that, but of course I’m not running any plugins to demo the site.
Not sure what “styled” type would be; I chose to use ordinary, generic fonts as part of the simplicity, but if it doesn’t violate any WP rules I could try the Google fonts I suppose. I don’t think twentyeleven or a lot of the popular themes use them, but I’d have to check on that. Anyway, thanks for the feedback.
PS: Found a good article that has some especially helpful advice under the picture of the dandelion:
http://wp.smashingmagazine.com/smashing-special-wordpress-theme-trends-for-2012-design/
For non-WP sites I have in fact made them so they present a completely different theme for mobile devices, without resorting to a subdomain such as mobile.mysite.com. The challenge would be to make that happen in WP.
Challenge accepted. ;-D
There are lots of mobile responsive WordPress themes around already and most will go that way in the future. See how the default Twenty Eleven theme works for example, and all the responsive themes here http://www.premiumwp.com/best-responsive-wordpress-themes/
As explained in that article “we’ll see responsive themes becoming the norm, rather than a novelty”
Responsive design is the future of web design, especially considering its now Googles recommended configuration for building smartphone optimised websites. http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com.au/2012/06/recommendations-for-building-smartphone.html
Thanks for those, I’ll check them out.
Alrighty, premiumwp… I’ve revamped it to be ultra-flexible, which necessitated moving a few things around, and I dispensed with the alternate color options for now. Even got some Google fonts. Is this a step in the right direction, do you think?
Standard GPL, esmi.
Also, I just added separate styling for mobile devices.
Hi 2thePoint
On my 30” monitor, the theme actually seems a bit compact.
When I made the <div id=”wrapper”> wider (1100 to 1200 px wide), and added more margin around the widgets (for example) — and then the theme looked much nicer on my 30” monitor
Best wishes
KajMagnus
Hi KajMagnus, thanks. 🙂
Yeah, that will depend on what people prefer and I tried to reach a compromise between super-wide and small low-res monitors.
