E.Webscapes Design Studio

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I have worked with Zee from Sister Told Jah since 2003. I think this is the 5th (maybe 6th?) time I’ve created a custom theme for her WordPress blog in that time, and each time is better than the last! This time around, she was going for a brighter look with white and sepia tones being the color choice on this design change…

This time around, Zee drew up a very basic idea of what she wanted done for her newest design. This is what she sent over for me to work with:

Her other specifications were that she wanted the site to be fluid – meaning that she wanted a four (4) column blog design that would fill the entire window of her visitors browser window, no matter what width/resolution they were viewing her site in. Fluid designs are always a challenge – but I made it happen for her!

The header area of her design is done just the way she wanted it – - very simple and clean with just a single image to the left, with her site title and tag line to the right. We used a rotating header script to allow her to add additional header images in the future so she can take advantage of random, rotating header images on her site if she wanted to.

When she told me that she really wanted to go with a sepia toned site, in terms of color scheme, I took the liberty of adding in a few design embellishments that I thought would work nicely with her overall theme, to dress it up a little. Although, she didn’t want a whole lot of graphic work done on this design – it did need something! With that in mind, I created different elements the incorporated a kind of ‘journal’ look and feel with elements like torn paper effects, tape, a little texture and a paper tag that I used for a section of her site she called “Hot Headlines”. This section of her site is coded so that she can provide links to hot news stories of the day; however, it’s not simply a blogroll of hot news links – the links are pulled in as actual posts on her blogs enables her readers to comment on. Zee really likes this feature a lot.

Zee was really happy with the final product when it was all over, and when I installed the theme on her site – I also upgraded her WordPress installation to the latest and greatest version of 2.7.1 and upgraded all of her plugins along with it. When I was done, she had a clean new blog design displaying on her site – and the back end of her WordPress was also clean and up to date all the way around.

She had a nice message for me when it was all done:

I had a reader email me early this morning and tell me how much he loved the design and how he was wanting to redesign his blog to give it a good look as well. I made sure to email him back to tell him who did the outstanding code work on my blog to make it look so doggone pretty, so he can contact ya?ll if he decides to get a design done

Perfect, Zee – send ‘em over! Thank YOU for coming back to E.Webscapes again for your design solution – I always enjoy working with you!