Download the Basic Theme Files

Once the curriculum in place, my first decision to make was what theme to start with. At the time, WordPress version 2.6 was around and I didn’t particularly want to use the Kubrick theme. I always disliked it and found it too messy. I had built quite a few sites with a now defunct theme, and decided that if I removed all of the unnecessary code and style, this theme would be a great starting point for my class and all of my projects. Thus was born the Basic Blog theme.

This theme has all the functionality of a typical WordPress theme but very little styling. It’s a bare bones theme or a framework for you to work from and has the following following features:

• Two column website measuring 960px wide.
• Widget enabled.
• Sidebar can be positioned on the right or left simply by switching the float direction in the CSS.
• Can be used to create a website with blog and static pages or just static pages if no blog is required.
• Requires no plugin.

Having gone through 3 intakes of students, I’ve had many opportunities to refine the theme. With the release of WordPress 3.0, I’ve now had to make further updates and the theme now also includes the following:

• Custom post thumbnails
• Custom menus
• Easy jQuery integration
• Excess information from header file is removed

Here’s a copy of the Basic Theme for you to download and play with. If you have any suggestions, comments on how it could be improved, please let me know.

I would also like to say thanks to Tzaddi and Catherine for providing their input on this theme and of course to all my EMD students who have thought me so much.

I have a “blank” WordPress theme for myself, because I make a lot of WordPress themes. Starting from Kubrick, or any other pre-made theme, would be absurd. There is to much stuff there that would have to be stripped out or fought against to be useful. So, I have my own.

Music to my ears. When I started using WordPress years ago, I couldn’t get my head around Kubrick. Cleaning the code took way too much time and energy. I originally created my own theme for a WordPress class. In order to teach students how to theme a site in 6 weeks, I needed something clean and void of excess stuff so I set up my Basic Theme.

I was thus curious when I read Chris’s article and downloaded his theme. It’s super clean and to my delight it’s not so different from mine. I have a lot more CSS than he does and he’s got some fancy stuff going on in his header.php, but overall I would highly recommend it. Starting from a clean theme to design a WordPress site is the best way to work. If you haven’t had a chance to try a blank theme, you should check it out.

Check out their website for other great icons.

Lee Fever at Common Craft has created this wonderful video explaining how web searches work and offers tips on how you can avoid being swallowed up by the web.

If you are collecting any type of information from your website, such as email for a newsletter or comments on your blog, then you should have a privacy policy in place. But what do you put in there?

Via a great post by Linda at Get Elastic, I found a privacy policy generator. Simply  enter your company details, answer questions by selecting radio buttons and checking off checkboxes that apply and voila. Your privacy policy in HTML or plain text is ready to go.

After a few minutes, this is the policy that was generated for Bluelime Media:

This is the web site of Bluelime Media.
Our postal address is
207-1238 Seymour Street
Vancouver

We can be reached via e-mail at info@bluelimemedia.com
or you can reach us by telephone at 604.561.6287
For each visitor to our Web page, our Web server automatically recognizes no information regarding the domain or e-mail address.
We collect the e-mail addresses of those who post messages to our bulletin board, the e-mail addresses of those who communicate with us via e-mail, no information on consumers who browse our Web page.
With respect to cookies: We do not set any cookies.
If you do not want to receive e-mail from us in the future, please let us know by sending us e-mail at the above address.
With respect to Ad Servers: We do not partner with or have special relationships with any ad server companies.

I don’t think that the wording is great and I think I would remove the info about ad servers. I’m not sure that it’s necessary, but this tool is a great start. Reading through all of the questions, it also made me think more about my website and how it is being used. It might also help your company if you do collect lots of information but aren’t sure if you should inform your users or not.

You can take it even a step further, and include a public calendar in your own website to list your events or schedule. When you sign up for a Google Calendar you can create more than one calendar — so if you had a Bed & Breakfast, for instance, a calendar for each room could show when it’s booked.

There are certainly more advanced and customized ways of doing some of these things, but this is some great functionality if you’re on a budget.

How to add a public calendar to your WordPress site

If you’re comfortable with the teensiest bit of HTML tweaking this is really easy to do.

1. Create a public calendar at google.com/calendar
2. Make a page in WordPress
3. Go to the Google Calendar Details screen and copy the code for including the calendar in your website
4. Paste it into your WordPress page. Note, you’ll need to switch from Visual view to Code view in your WordPress editor. You may also need to adjust the width and height to fit your page layout.

Your website calendar page will be kept up-to-date because it loads all the events you add within the Google Calendar interface, each time your page is visited.

That’s it. Neat trick, eh?

Conley notes Pixar as a great example of creative business success which “basically create[s] a new billion dollar franchise every four years or so”. Truly an amazing track record. He discusses what makes them so successful, which boils down more or less to:

• strongly adhering to a higher purpose – in Pixar’s case “To create great stories”. Fabulous storytelling is more important than fancy computer graphics. Mission and focus is paramount.
• dynamic leadership & a talented team – every project is led by a director-producer pair that brings complementary strengths to the table and is responsible for the project’s outcome in different ways. Their team is made up of artists and technologists that can make their work better through critique. A strong team is diverse and challenges each other.
• a highly iterative and tangible process – experimenting and sketching begins on day one. There is no waiting for mounds of research or scripts holding back the creative process. The great story they’ll tell gets figured out along the way. You needn’t have it all figured out from the start, get out there and do something.

Finally, Conley says

If corporations were to adopt these principles, behaviors, and values in their innovation-oriented work, they would be orders of magnitude more successful.

There are some good ideas in that list which resonate with me. What do you think?