You’re now looking at a brand new look for this little blog of mine. The previous look for tantannoodles.com was getting old, was based on someone else’s work, and sorta looked like every other blog out there. Since I do actually build web sites for a living, I thought I should just suck it up and go build a brand new theme from scratch. How hard can it possibly be? As you can see, all I really managed to do with the new design was to add some drop shadows with Photoshop. So my new design is quite simple, but I think it works quite well for this blog. Building out the templates from scratch also gives me a good opportunity to learn how the template system actually work in WordPress, which is the software this site is built on.

The first thing you’ll probably notice is that the site is wider than before. That’s because I’m trying out a stretchy layout, where the main content area is stretchable and the right sidebar is a fixed width. No tables are used for the layout, and everything is positioned with CSS using floated elements and negative margins. Feel free to look at the source code if you’re interested in how it works. There is also a maximum width of 1024 pixels and a minimum width of 760 pixels, since I think content starts to become hard to read beyond those boundaries, but this only works if you’re not using Internet Explorer. Also, let me say that working around the bugs in Internet Explorer is a royal pain in the butt. Case in point, absolutely or relatively positioned elements mixed with floated elements will just randomly disappear. Blah.

For the color scheme, I basically just reused the colors from the previous look, since I think they work quite well together. Links are red (#D7380F), titles are green (#336600), text is black, and any “unimportant” text is gray (#888888). The background color is also a tan-ish color (#F2F2E9).

All in all, creating new templates for WordPress was relatively painless. I was able to pretty much do everything I wanted to without too much hassle. Documentation is pretty good, though I think it could be organized a little better. The only thing that didn’t make it into the new design was the photo gallery, which is now just redirecting to Flickr.

Hope you like the new look! Don’t be surprised if stuff starts to fall apart and break, since this is my first crack at a WordPress theme and I’ll probably continue to tweak it every now and then. And please do post a comment to let me know what you think about the new look

Here’s a screenshot of the old and busted, if you can’t remember what it looked like.