The Starrenburg’s Website

I use the ‘Dark’ Wordpress theme, designed by Wolfgang Bartelme from Bartelme Design (great theme, great graphic designer, thanks Wolfgang!) & modified for Wordpress by iLEMONed.

When I setup my site using the ‘Dark’ theme native tag support had not been released for Wordpress. I just upgraded to Wordpress 2.5.1 so I though it was time to include tag support. I found this helpful post on the ThemeLab website. Couple of minutes work and dropped in onto the sidebar using a tags ‘cloud’. Easy!

As can be seen the most popular tag is ‘Wordpress’ - no surprises there. Wordpress is one of the best, and continually getting better, blogging software packages out there.

Along with the move to the Mac I decided to update the WordPress theme for my site. I did some browsing and found this very bold and clean theme called “Dark Theme“.

The original design is from Bartleme Design in Austria, with CSS and coding for WordPress done by iLEMONed in China - thanks guys!

Coincidently, Wolfgang is a Mac user. I knew there had to be a reason why the theme particularly looks good on the Mac.

I’ve done a small number of changes to the layout of the design, most particularly to make the right sidebar one column instead of two to give more room to the body of the post. Also I made another template which removes the sidebar and the bottom (but not the footer) to make a straight page design which can be used as a ‘non blog’ web page.

Well it’s here! My site’s all new, fully designed for WordPress 1.5, theme - “The Low Sky”.

I had wanted for a while to update my blog to a native WordPress 1.5 theme, and had looked at all of the themes submitted to the recent theme competition on Alex King’s blog. But, to be honest, none of them had really caught my attention. Too many similar variations on a “theme”, and too little real estate for displaying content.

I looked at my then current theme (a converted 1.2 template) which actually had only been in use for a short time (from when I had started using WordPress) and thought - well I basically liked the main layout of the theme but wanted to have it as a native 1.5 theme. What to do - in the end I decided if there was none available which I could customise, then I would get a blog designer to develop one with me.

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