sesam.hu

Engineering Manager | Trail Runner | Stockholm, Sweden

Make It Worn beta

Friday, 31 October, 2008 - sesam

It's been a while I stumbled upon Bart-Jan Verhoef's site and his three-part tutorial on how to create a worn look to a site. He was kind enough to share a template page to show how he built up the final design. I liked it instantly and decided to implement it for WordPress.

You may remember I have been dissatisfied with how the journal was designed for a while now. I wanted something cleaner, wider, more serious and less emo. Bart-Jan's worn look is just like that with the additional perk of keeping the aged papery texture of my old clumsy design. So here's how SeSam.hu will look from now on.

I was trying to be as faithful to the original template page as possible. However WordPress has some specialities and it needs to integrate a wider array of functions which made it necessary to move a few pixels around. (The IE bug that prevents elements from floating properly in rows is a prime example. That one took hours to fix and caused a significant headache.)

I have to admit, building a template for WordPress is not an easy job. Unlike when I was just designing for myself a proper distributable template needs to be a lot more flexible and adapt to all the different blogs out there. The design must be prepared to handle a plethora of data structures. It remains to be seen how well I did to achieve that.

Not all the features I wanted are included, but I felt the design was ready for a live beta. Please if you encounter any quirks, malfunctions or errors do contact me or comment to this post.

Features or functions missing that I'd like to implement:

Features unlikely to be implemented:

I'm sure as soon as I press publish a dozen more will spring to my mind.

Anyway, if you like it and would like to use it I ask only a little bit of your patience just yet. Before making a downloadable version I'd like to sort a few things out and add the missing features. The reason why I applied it to SeSam.hu is that I'd like to test it live. Naturally since the whole site is licensed under creative commons if you insist on having this beta version email me and I shall send it to you.