My investigation and study of various photoshop blogs and tutorials ist starting to pay off; I am working on a slight make-over of the BlueMonday Coaching website. Today, I successfully incorporated the first changes (most notably the nice jQuery accordion on the blog page). Some more stuff will follow – I will tweak the menus, add some nice web2.0 buttons and reformat the searchbox. Just stay tuned and visit the site… over and over again. 
So here we go with the second episode on how I created the BlueMonday WordPress theme. In the meantime, some minor things changed, but the website is up and running and you can see it at www.bluemonday-coaching.ch.
In this episode, I am explaining the photoshop technique behind the theme. I decided not to actually re-create the PSD file, as this is probably pretty boring, however, I hope this webcast gives you some idea in how I attacked the challenge.
I got inspired from other websites; especially, I want to mention the really nice Paper Business theme, which is also discussed in a similar webcast series over at In the Woods. Now, I hope that you don’t blame me of simple plagiarism – as I had the idea for this webcast in me for quite a while, but never had a completed, good theme at hand to realize it. So hopefully, you appreciate my efforts here – in the next couple of webcasts, I will dive into WP theme creation, and I will definitively follow a different track than Drew, although I like his style very much.
For the navigation bit at the top, I had some ideas, but never really got down to the bottom, until I encountered this nice list at SmashingMagazine. Look at nclud.com – the little triangles are inspired by this site…
Other parts of this series
As I already blogged, I did a massive redesign on one of the websites I look after. I finally got Photoshop, and I digged myself through a lot of webcasts and tutorials to quickly get up to speed.
So – here is the first webcast on the new theme; it’s not at all technical, but rather a “tour d’horizon” of what you can expect. If you want to see the site in action, head over to www.bluemonday-coaching.ch – it will be back online tomorrow Sunday afternoon or evening.
The site is obviously based on WordPress.
Here are the plugins used:
The ajax-search field is based on a very good tutorial I found over at XCodeTuts. Thanks, guys!
EDIT: Sorry – just realized that it’s hard to read ANYTHING in this webcast! For the photoshop and coding bits, I will set everything to a higher resolution…
2009, tkhobbes 