Thoughts about what I want in a theme

It’s been way too long since I start­ed, but did­n’t actu­al­ly fin­ish, the process of mov­ing all the old arti­cles on this site over into Word­Press. I got bogged down and did­n’t real­ly fin­ish, so the site stayed half-done and sucky. Now I don’t know if I should even both­er fin­ish­ing. Part of the trou­ble is that those arti­cles are SO old that when I start mov­ing them, I get bogged down in updat­ing them and I end up rewrit­ing them, and it’s hard to fin­ish even one section!

Anoth­er is that I hate mess­ing with any­thing because I’m real­ly not sat­is­fied with my theme. Every time I do any­thing with the site I start pok­ing at the theme, then I start look­ing at new themes, but I nev­er real­ly find any­thing I like because what I real­ly want is a theme that’s all mine. But I haven’t found any­thing on the sites that sell cus­tom theme pack­ages that I like enough to pay for — they all seem to look fair­ly blech to me.

But I don’t hon­est­ly know what I DO want well enough to describe it to a design­er, and I cer­tain­ly don’t know enough to cre­ate what­ev­er that is myself from scratch. Good­ness knows I would­n’t want to try to work with some­one who is as unsure as I am about it — what a nightmare!

“Well, I don’t like what’s there, but I don’t like any of the stuff I’ve seen, either. I know I don’t want a mag­a­zine lay­out. Or a pho­to gallery lay­out. Or any of those lay­outs that stick all that stuff at the bot­tom. No, noth­ing that relies too heav­i­ly on drop-down menus, either. Well, I real­ly like the ones with flex­i­ble widths, but I know they’re a real bitch to design. And I pre­fer hav­ing the option to have wid­gets on both sides, but I don’t know if I want to be forced to have them on both sides, you know? And I want to be able to have com­ments on pages and posts. And I need to be able to under­stand the CSS enough to make it work with plu­g­ins like Now Read­ing. I mean, the reboot of Now Read­ing. And what­ev­er quo­ta­tion plu­g­in I end up choos­ing. Would it be pos­si­ble to make it work with Gallery?

“I’d like to have a dis­tinc­tive head­er on top, then use the col­ors from it through­out the site. I like using lots of col­or, but noth­ing tacky or gaudy. Rain­bow col­ors are good, but I don’t want it to look like I ripped off a gay pride parade ban­ner. And no pas­tels. Ugh. I love pur­ple! Not laven­der, pur­ple. No vio­let. That’s Fuschia. Yes, I do know that col­ors look dif­fer­ent on dif­fer­ent screens.

“Read­abil­i­ty is extreme­ly impor­tant because I’m a tex­tu­al per­son at heart. I hate sites that aren’t nice and leg­i­ble, so I would­n’t want mine that way. I write, and I want peo­ple to be able to read the words eas­i­ly. Includ­ing peo­ple who use screen read­ers. The site has to be acces­si­ble (let’s say WCAG 1.0 com­pat­i­ble, at the very very least?)

“It’s a mom blog. Sort of. I mean, I don’t review kids prod­ucts or any of that crap. No dia­pers or din­ners or purs­es or any of that. Not even play­dates. Those are long gone. But I do talk about par­ent­ing and home­mak­ing and home edu­ca­tion. But I also talk about rela­tion­ships and polyamory — well, maybe it isn’t a mom blog any more. Mom is just in the name. It’s a long sto­ry. I put reviews and per­son­al posts and talk about blog­ging and gad­gets things like that in here. The occa­sion­al rant. And stuff about stitch­ing. I don’t know what will be in here in the future. It has changed over time. We’ll see. Does it matter?”

Oh yeah. That’s help­ful. I don’t want to work with me. Would you?

(I post­ed the pic­ture just because it’s pretty.)