The reasults of the new theme are already up on this blog…

The customization went pretty smooth with only a few gotchas.

My personal choice of tools were:

• Xara Extreme for vector graphics. I have designed the whole page with this proggy.
• GIMP the bitmap editor – to slice up the page into manageble pieces.
• Bluefish text editor on Ubuntu.
  The story here is that I am running an Ubuntu virtual machine with WordPress installed (and some other apps as well), where I can do all sorts of test and customization without breaking the live site.

I used the default theme from WordPress as the basis for my new theme: blupark ONE. The documentation is pretty clear about how to do theme customization and the default theme is fairly well structured and documented (inline comments).

A few gotchas though:

• Most of the customization is done through CSS. As a matter of fact, hardly anything had to be done with the HTML/PHP code – at least for the moment. The difficulty is that it is very easy to get lost in the hierarchy and long list of style definitions.
• The theme uses a set of well placed DIV, rather than a TABLE, to partition the page content. I am not sure which one is worse actually. TABLEs have a pain in the neck behavior when you start playing with padding, border, margin, width, height, etc. DIVs are similarly rubbish when it comes to constructing a page.

I am planning further tuning and enhancements to the theme, these will come later…