I’ve been working on some WordPress builds for clients recently and decided it was a bit ridiculous that my own website didn’t have a custom theme.

Despite my utter contempt for WordPress as a piece of software, building a simple theme that behaves largely like a blog is not too hard. This one took about a day and I only had to throw one monitor out the window. (acceptable).

It’s not beautiful, but here it is …

Surprise – it’s grey.

It’s simpler

The theme is very basic on purpose and I’ve removed a lot of bloat. Gone are the Like buttons (they achieved nothing for me), but I’ve kept the tweet and follow buttons.

There are no graphics in the theme – the icons are achieved with Font Awesome.

It’s (a bit) responsive

This was my first attempt at some responsive design and a vague attempt at the whole ‘mobile first’ thing . The main body of the layout is targeted at iPad width (786 pixels). When you drop below 1024 pixels the side bar widgets move to the top and collapse.

Unfortunately I don’t have an iPad to try it out on :(

The layout changes again when you drop to mobile width. It’s not beautiful on iPhone, but it’s legible. It was only two years ago that I installed the WPTouch mobile theme, but the idea of a completely separate mobile front end already seems old fashioned.