Simplified WordPress Theme from Crimson Pear

Clearly I’m very bad at self-promotion because I haven’t shared this with you yet. This is my latest WordPress theme called ‘Simplified’ and is available for sale on the Crimson Pear web shop and on my Crimson Pear Etsy store. It’s a little change in direction from my previous themes, and it seems to reflect both current trend and my own thoughts about what a blog design should be doing for the content of a blog. I have increasingly felt that a design should take the back seat, so to speak, to your content and your words and imagery should be more prominent. I’ve tried to find a connection between the designs that I find really pleasing and the commonality seems to be simple and elegant, so this is what I was hoping to achieve.

This theme represents a deviation of another more nerdy kind. This is the first time I have created a mobile-first design. This means the design was created firstly for the mobile platform e.g. iPhone and then incrementally changed to accommodate tablets and desktops. I thought this would be an onerous and frustrating way to work but I wanted to try it out. Let me tell you this has been a great way to approach blog design and it made me really concentrate on the essence of the design and get rid of the superfluous.

Finally I have to say the whole process was not without it’s frustrations. I used Bones HTML 5 starter theme as my base, which is has beautiful code and great documentation. My first hurdle was to add Custom Headers to allow people who bought this theme the ability to add or remove their own header images. Adding was a breeze but in doing so I killed the menus and that was a few days of troubleshooting to work out why – nothing ever goes smoothly. The second hurdle of sorts was the learning curve to understand and use LESS, a way of writing CSS that is then compiled. It’s my innate stubbornness that would not give up and I’m so pleased I persisted. Once the ‘ah ha’ moment arrived there was no turning back.

I have since sold this theme to two blogging friends, who both have very popular blogs, and this makes me feel that I’ve succeeded in my quest to provide a great platform for great content.