WAKEshine

We’ve made a lot of progress on bluebarb.  The main structure of the site is up and the instructional article is written.  I’m not liking the web template.  I tried to turn on the widgets and I don’t like the way they look and they’re interfering with the text.  I may still have to get the images shrunk down a bit but even with that I’m not sure this template is going to make it.

There are so many good Wordpress web templates out there but so many of them have some clever part about them or an image that is so unique to a niche that I would have to redo a lot of it just to get it to work.

On the other end of the spectrum is paying for a template according to my own design, and somewhere in the middle is building my own, something I can do from the technical perspective but which never looks good from the graphic design perspective.

I think the solution is to find a generic template that works and to split it out and standardize it so that it’s easy to change the fonts, graphics, and color scheme of it.  Then I can reuse it for different sites.

The templates I want should be clear and clean, with widgets that encourage browsing the site.  I’ve seen templates where the widgets all start out "collapsed," so that the viewer has to click a button to expand it and see the contents.  That is not going to do me much good for a part of the site that I want to lead the user around.  Others are designed with bland fonts, or lists that make it difficult to see the individual items.

All of this, however, is not the gray area I’m talking about.

I’ve got the site almost completed from the "framework" point of view.  The original three-month plan is to get a few articles and let the site go, hoping that I get enough search engine traffic that ultimately converts into people adding the widget to their Google homepage.  Can that really work though?

I guess it comes down to this: this particular plan is based on wanting to spend the minimum resources on the project.  So if that is still my goal, I guess it comes down to mostly monitoring this site.  But the more I work on it, the more I enjoy it.  So who knows?  Maybe I’ll decide to spend some more resources on this one.

On the other hand, my music site is starting to get some hits……