February 29, 2008

This is the fifth post in my series, Themery : Blogged, where I blog about each step of a WordPress theme design.

Does a blog really need a home page?

I have put together a design for the home page; It was an automatic reaction. I’m not sure if this is because the principle of not repeating content has been drummed into me, whether the plain, blog-post-on-the-front is just too easy, because I have a home page of sorts on my own blog, or whether the magazine style is just rubbing off.

Whatever the reason I did design a home page to go with this theme.

The main part of the page is a very large header, and an excerpt from the current post.

Beneath this is an area broken into columns. Which I considered making a dynamic sidebar to allow greater customisation potential. That would also have necessitated using PHP to determine the number of columns in use to ensure that the full width was used regardless of the number of widgets included.

One aspect of this page which is noticeably different from the others is that I have actually used a gradient on this page. In producing the mockup I felt that without the gradient, subtle as it is, the page wasn’t adequately terminated. It felt as though it would go on forever and the gradient, my one concession to the pure white of the rest of theme achieves that termination.

The version shown above is the fifth iteration of this home page. I tried it out with a number of ideas, including giving the main position to the author information, making the columns into the last three posts, having four articles, and all of the above in different iterations.

With hindsight the lack of clear direction for the home page should have alerted me to something important that I missed. I made a fairly fundamental error in designing it: I didn’t consider why.

I could have produced it and move on. But design is not about fulfilling expectations, or repeating the default settings. It is about considering the end goal and working to meet that. The end goal of these theme is minimalism.

In my first post of this series I described minimalism as the point at which everything you want and need is available, but somehow hidden until you need it. Where nothing exists without purpose, and everything that exists is something you both need and want.

If I want to stick to this description then I need to discard the home page.

The home page in a minimalist context is not much better than those awful splash pages you used to find on flash sites. It is a barrier to the content, not a sign post, or a guide, and therefore is neither purposeful, needed, or desired.

Despite having designed the home page, I will not build it.

Next week’s posts will focus on the build. This for me is the fun bit. I have some ideas that I’m really exciting about, and that I haven’t mentioned so far. Things I haven’t tried before. I had forgotten how much fun CSS can be.

In the meantime, if I have missed anything, then let me know.