This new blog design is inspired by some odd things. I won’t lie to ya’all about that. I thought you might be interested in the design process and how it all came about.

Knowing Nothing –

Where I started with this was not even knowing how customizable these templates were, whether they could be changed at all, whether I might pay someone to design one that looks incredible for me, whether it was worthwhile investing in a paid theme, whether I could use my existing header.. these were the questions swarming around in my brain before I began to play with WordPress at all.

Finding A Good Base

Courtney Tuttle is a blogger I have been reading for a while, and someone I trust when it comes to Search Engine Optimization. This was a topic I didn’t know a lot about but I did want to make sure my theme was optimized for the search engines. Courtney happens to have spent some serious time optimizing popular themes and you can see them all here – Search Engine Optimized WordPress Themes.

Freedom Green & Widgetized & Optimized –

The theme I chose originally looked like this –

It certainly looked fantastic but I wanted something unique. The Other Half was about to take a week of holidays, so we sat down to play with the theme. He is excellent with technical stuff. I am good with ideas. The two of us together created this beautiful theme.

Inspiration From The Kitchen –

My Mother bought me this set of silicone cupcake trays. I love the shade of blue you see here. It is best described as Cobalt Blue and you see it often in glass. I have some glass things in that color too.

So when I was looking for a background color I took this cupcake tray in and said “Let’s get the background color as close to that as we can”. I think we managed it.

Inspiration From Windows Vista –

The colored bar which was in my header graphic is from a theme for Simple Machines Forums – SMF for short. SMF is the engine which runs my Fraudstars forums. A long time ago when we were looking at themes I had seen the Windows Vista theme and I loved that graphic. It actually comes from a background image of Vista, though we were unable to figure out exactly where in the background image.

Theme Imitates Life –

After we spent half a day working on the theme, The Other Half and I went for a beach walk. Out in the water I could see all the colors of my theme. There is that dark blue, there is the teal green, sometimes the ocean looks just like that Windows Vista graphic.

You Can Do It –

If you don’t have the knowledge to do a new theme but you have some time on your hands and you’re willing to play around with graphics programs you will be able to create something you love.

Settle In And –

Make yourselves comfortable. I intend to stick with this theme for at least 12 months. I want stability for my readers and for me. It is important to me that it looks good and I think the theme we designed does look amazing. I also intend to stick with the back end which is behind it – the plugins won’t change, I won’t be adding new things for quite some time, and I’ll be staying with WordPress for the foreseeable future.

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