Santhosh’s Blog

History.

Ever since I started this blog, I have changed about 4 themes. Out of which 3 are designed from other Web Designers. But after I became as a Web Designer myself, I started designing many themes for wordpress and I designed a very simple theme for my blog which was just around 30KB in size including images, it was WP-Replica. That was my 4th theme and was designed by myself. I used that theme for more than 6 months.

The Making….

And for a change for this new year, I decided to design a theme for my blog and came up with this theme. I wanted the theme to be clean, elegant and dark. So I started hunting for a good dark abstract wallpaper or image on the web and came up with JosephYang’s Titanium Silver wallpaper. Later I optimized the image to load faster on slower connections. So honestly I did not design the background of this theme. So all credit goes to him.

After downloading the wallpaper, I started designing the theme body using Fireworks. And after 4 long hours of playing with layers and shades in fireworks, I came up with this theme layout. Then I started coding the CSS for the theme and assembled all the PHP elements to the locations where they are supposed to be. This theme took about 8 long hours of designing and coding. And about 10 minutes to validate the xHTML and CSS.

The “Obsidian”.

I named this theme as Obsidian, because it looks familiar to the Obsidian mineral which is dark, shiny and bit matte. Also myself being a Geology student, I decided to name this theme with some mineral’s name.
Hehe…

Benchmarking….

Validation.

This theme is “Valid XHTML 1.0 Transitional” and “Valid CSS 2.1“. The CSS won’t validate as valid because I have used a round corner for borders hack for firefox. And the W3C Validator detects it as invalid code. So I have uploaded the CSS file without the hack and you can see, its “Valid CSS 2.1“. So this theme comply with W3C standards, which I wanted it to be.

Speed

Later I wanted to test the loading speed of this theme, so analyzed my theme using “Web Page Analyzer – 0.98” without any content and as expected the load time was pretty “High” on slower connection because I used 102KB background image. So this theme takes 13.98 seconds to load on a 128K connection and 5.41 seconds on T1.

Browser Compatibility.

This theme works fine on Firefox 3.0.5, Opera 9.63, Google Chrome, Internet Explorer 7, Maxthon2, Avant 11.5.

This theme do not work fine on Internet Explorer 6 at the moment, because of transparent background that I have used for the theme body. And there will be some displacement of elements as well. I wanted NOT to support Internet Explorer 6 anymore, because it is obsolete and has pissed many designers enough. I want IE6 users to switch to other free open source browsers or upgrade to IE7. However I will later code a secondary stylesheet for IE6, because I do not want few users to run as soon as they visit my blog.

Conclusion…

Finally, the theme is up and my blog has got unique look. And I would like to read your comment on my theme. If you find any bug, please report me. The only known issue is lag during scrolling. This is because of fixed body background. The lagging will be more if you have loads of applications running in the background and few tabs open in the browser.

Also, this theme looks good on widescreen monitors. If you don’t have one, this is how it looks on 22″ widescreen monitor.

Thanks for reading my post

Credits: Thanks to JosephYang for the background image and FamFamFam for icons.