What you are currently seeing on our site is ContentRobot’s “starter” WordPress theme. Dubbed “New3Column2pt0,” this simple shell contains very minimal styling and acts mainly to display the most basic 3 column functionality with an added Web 2.0 footer feature area.
We have a collection of various “starter” themes with either one, two or three columns that already have most of the necessary WordPress code and styles already applied. These themes have been heavily optimized and are explicitly designed to provide the utmost flexibility for us to customize them. We use these structured themes as a basis to build many of our client’s custom designs. As you can see these starter themes are pretty stripped down and neutral in design.
For our new site, we started with a structure and content similar to our old design (tag cloud, recent posts, newsletter signup, etc). We knew we wanted to be able to show more content then we could with our old design, so we went with a 3 column design that also incorporates the additional footer feature area.
For now, we have added our Twitter stream, popular posts, and recent comments with the help of various WordPress plugins. The content may ultimately change, but we wanted to show some content options while we develop the theme.
So, What’s Next?
Now that our site functions properly and all the contents is generally in the right places, we can get to work on building our Photoshop concept and converting it into the WordPress theme. Slowly you’ll see the visual elements pop in and see the CSS getting shaped. Where necessary, we’ll create custom templates (for the home page, of course, but really most of the pages will need some work) and make the blog more styled and more readable.
In our next post we will cover some of the thinking behind our new structure and how we will be streamlining the information presented on our site. Right now we feel very vulnerable with a non-styled site, but we hope you enjoy watching our transformation and learning something about our process while we do it.