May 22, 2008

I was browsing through my WordPress theme feeds this morning and I had an amazing sense of Deja-vu. The themes were new, but I recognised the approach; an aproach that is almost guaranteed to produce appaling results.

In the 90s Britain was gripped by a home decorating boom. A lot of people credit one T.V. show for kickstarting this, and that show was Changing Rooms.

The premise was simple: Two designers each spend two days redesigning a room in someone’s house. The designer in one house is aided by the owners of the other. As friends or family they know the tastes of their friends and so can steer the designer.

Of course the designers never stood a chance. The couples never really knew their friend’s tastes, but had a generic overview of some things they had sort of expressed an interest in.

The designers’ job then was to take a generic and ill-defined concept which they could not discuss with the end users, on a small budget, with only a little help from a proper craftsman, and, in two days, turn that into something that would be interesting and accessible for television, and appealing to the owner.

The result would invariably be a ‘themed’ room.

“John and Sandra went to Morroco last year and they loved it,” results in terracotta walls and clay pots, but what was beautiful when you were sipping cold drinks on the veranda in the heat and sunshine of Morroco is just brown paint and cold floor tiles when you replicate it in a housing estate in Harrogate.

Out of context these things don’t work because their existence was never purely astethic in the first place. Morrocan houses are the colour they are because of the materials available and the environment they are made in. Spanish houses are white to keep them cool, not because they look nice.

And this is where we connect again with WordPress themes.

If you want to design a theme do you use design, or decoration? What if the theme is for a Formula 1 fansite?

• Do you think about the kinds of things the user will write about?
• Do you work to develop the theme to support a defined race calendar, news in-between and an off-season?
• Do you consider a custom function to countdown to the next race?
• Do you provide space for track diagrams and guides, or better yet, provide some track layouts?
• Do you think about the way the writer might want to focus on personalities, or indeed specific teams and offer design options to highlight when this is the case?

Or, do you use a standard blog layout, put little Formula 1 cars at the end of each header, and make it red, because your header image has a Ferrari on it?

If you want to churn out appalling themes, for whatever reason, then ignore the first list and focus on decoration. Don’t worry about the needs and intentions of the potential end user or the reader, just pick a standard layout, perhaps even copy one (they are all just blogs after all) then change the colours and add a different picture at the top. You could even focus on the details and sprinkle some related clip art about the place.

Give it a go, it’s great fun!

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