This week I started working on my site, primarily looking through the themes for its appearance and functionality. The main challenge so far is finding a way to properly suppress the “default” options and functions of certain themes. The problem with these default themes is that they have a bunch of rather useless or meaningless functions. This includes stock images, redundant texts and background colors.
I remember from creating both my webcomic and my school blog site that these impracticalities are difficult to rectify, but not impossible. This is due to the fact that for whatever reason, WordPress decided to scatter the settings for a site. Some things can be changed through the customization menu, which gives you a live view of what your site will look like as well as options to modify aesthetics of the site.
However, more technical modifications to the site have to be done through the WordPress dashboard. One of the biggest roadblocks with these kinds of modifications is that the technical layout varies depending on what theme is being used, so technical changes usually don’t carry over.
I’ve been working with three themes. This week I’ll modify each theme to get it to fit the desired format and aesthetic. This week I intend tweak each theme to see which one will be the best fit for the site. I hope to have this done in time to include a finished theme into the heuristics presentation this Wednesday.