So after a year – literally – of creating this site – Grafficious.net – to house my most recent creative works and then experiencing a figurative drought in regards to progress, I have finally gotten everything (important) together and this site – once barren of content and bedeviled by a smattering of coding bugs – has now received a shot of much-needed energy and life while the bugs have been fully exterminated.
Now that the site is mostly functional in the manner that I had first envisioned it to be, I will take a moment to share my thoughts and experience in the building and decorating process.
When the notion for Grafficious was first born, the intention was to build a website that showed the full extent of what I had learned over the years in terms of website design, website coding, and WordPress Theming.
Before I built Grafficious.net, I had the vision of building a child theme based off of WordPress’ own Twenty Ten Theme which would allow the fullest flexibility of layout styles possible which adhering fully to W3C standards. Specifically, I wanted a theme that allowed for options for a tableless and fully-widgetized (if desired) 3-Column, 2-Column, and 1-Column layout with the ability to swap between the layouts for different Pages or Page-types and with each layout being fully flexible in terms of width and height.
At the time of Grafficious‘ ‘birth’, there was no such option fully available (aside from my own that I had been working on) that I liked and flexible width layouts in particular were – and still are – the most difficult types of layouts to code for as vague dimensions are the exact things that provoke CSS errors the most frequently.
Though I had the child WordPress theme that I had been working on and had readied for implementation, it still wasn’t quite right and as I got Grafficious.net built up, I realized that I was still missing quite a few features that I needed to make my site operate in the way that I had envisioned.
Crafting a fully flexible and tableless 3-Column design had been a challenge enough, but implementing 1-Column and 2-Column fully-widgetized options whose widgets would not conflict with pre-existing widgets from the 3-Column design proved to be something of a major brain teaser.
If I wasn’t triggering every last CSS dimension-related bug (CSS most loves specific dimensions of things and the last thing I was doing was giving it specifics), then I was running into Theme compatibility issues where I couldn’t quite figure out how to make the different widgets on all the different pages not conflict with one another without using Plugins.
Finally, after a long while of not making much progress and getting ‘stuck’ with the issue with the widgets, I decided to temporarily shelve the website in favor of making more progress elsewhere in other projects.
Fast forward to now and after a sudden spur of inspiration and many partially successful attempts later, I have finally managed to build the fully flexible WordPress child Theme based off of the Twenty Ten Theme that I had always intended and envisioned building.
My theme allows for a fully flexible 3-Column, 2-Column, and 1-Column Page option with additional non-conflicting widget options and further easy-to-add Page additions.
Though the Theme isn’t going commercial or to the public (it still has some minor quirks that I am ironing out), I am happy that I have been able to get achieve what I had hoped to achieve and so, I am proud to announce that Grafficious.net has been Reborn into the website that it now is.
