NOTE: This theme is still very beta … I would love to get some feedback across multiple operating systems and multiple browsers. Please feel free to contribute any changes in Github.

Like many designers a good chunk of my projects involve Wordpress and customizing Wordpress themes. My coding process typically starts with taking the default theme and coding in my new design. The default Wordpress theme, Kubrick, was designed by Michael Heilemann many years ago and the Wordpress team adopted it and it now gets included with every version of Wordpress that you download. Unfortunately this theme isn’t maintained what so ever, infact Mr Heilemann doesn’t even use Wordpress anymore.

I can see why Kubrick was chosen as the Wordpress default. It is clean, modern and simple. Unfortunately from a design perspective, I find it a nightmare to work with. This is probably because of the age of the code, but the lack of things like resets, the structure of the page and just some bizzarre code choices force me to do a lot of work before I even start my design work.

I am fed up with it.

The Theme

So here is Designers Default. It is a modification of Kubrick, designed to look and function just like Kubrick but “updated” in concepts and code. If you aren’t a designer, you aren’t going to appreciate this, because beyond some small visual changes, it will look just like Kubrick from the outside.

From a coder perspective, that is a whole other story.

Designers Default includes things like …

• Eric Meyer’s Reset template included ( http://meyerweb.com/eric/tools/css/reset/)
• 960 Grid Template (http://960.gs/)) added for easy sizing control.
• Print stylesheet added for cleaner blog printing – hides useless components when you print like footer and sidebar
• CSS Templates added for IE6 and IE7 Exceptions
• IE6 Transparent PNG fix included.
• Debugging CSS Added (Commented Out) for easy theme debugging
• Post content broken out into seperate template to reduce repetition
• Navigation content broken out into seperate template to reduce repetition
• About template broken out to make it easier for beginners to edit.
• XHTML 1.0 Strict doctype
• Moved About Post data into definition lists
• Comments put on each template so you can tell what to edit by looking at the source.
• Comments put in the CSS source for quick changes.
• Header broken into layered transparent images so you can change the color with a simple hex or upload an image to be the background.
• Page frame broken into layered transparent images so you can change the color of the background with a simple hex
• Added RSS Icons to footer.
• Added Calendar and Tag Cloud added to sidebar and styled – just so you can see it is there.
• Page width expanded to 1024px which is the standard in page width.
• Line height on paragraph increased to 1.5em
• Includes PSD for graphics

This all being said, I think it is a great start point template. It was not built with performance in mind, meaning the code isn’t optimized or compressed as its intentions are for designers to dig in and code. If you want to compress the code at the end, go ahead… thats your business.

Right now the theme is still very beta, I probably will need to use it for a couple of client jobs and fine tune it, but it is mostly there so I figured I would share