Arcane Palette Creative Design » artistic graphic design

jazzsequence is my personal blog, so it’s one of those things that I tinker with constantly.  I loved the old theme i had up before, but there were things I wanted to do that i just couldn’t do with that design.  for one, it was very narrow — I wanted to be able to sell ad space if traffic picked up enough, so the new design would need preferably 260 pixels to accommodate standard, large square ads, and 125 pixel square smaller ads.  another requirement was pages — i had a lot of pages that just weren’t very visible in the old design which was more of a straightforward blog layout.  pages were relegated to a sidebar widget amongst a bunch of other sidebar widgets, and therefore hard to find.

but the other thing i wanted to do with the new design was to be able to integrate social media updates, different kinds of posts, and posts from different sources, and style them uniquely so you can tell they are different things.  in short, i wanted something that was a bit of a cross between a tumblog and a Facebook wall stream.

the updated design is grid-based.  regular posts are displayed, magazine-style, with thumbnails next to post excerpts.  i also have a class for “asides” where i post random thoughts that are too long for twitter, links, or videos, which are displayed in full, without the title.  posts from other sources are displayed with the title styled differently than posts from jazzsequence.com, and are given an icon to represent where they are from.  a similar method is used to style posts on the lifestream page.

the theme uses 3 different sidebars depending on where you are on the site.  this gives me the opportunity to hone the sidebar items to be somewhat more relevant to the content displayed on the page as well as make it possible to rotate the ad boxes on the sidebar.  pages display a list of related entries which is especially useful since most of the pages are part of a family of entries — fiction has a series of sub-pages for each piece, ditto for essays and music.  so from any page in a given tree, you can easily access other pages that might be related (this was borrowed from Darren Hoyt’s Mimbo theme).

I also designed a separate page template for the about page.  this page’s purpose is to give a bit of information about me and an easy place to display the various social networks that i have accounts on and/or use regularly.  I also split the content to give a definition of the name of the site.

i have a ton of content — I’ve been keeping a blog for about 7 years, and have had a non-blog website in one form or another since the mid- to late-90s, and there’s a lot of stuff I wanted to put on my site.  so I wanted to have a theme on the site that would be able to support that much content.  later I added in the dynamic content gallery — after putting that in the dirty creative site — as a way to feature my most popular and/or recent blog entries.  there’s so much content, from so many places, that I liked the idea of having a way to feature the longer-format posts on the front page, right at the top.

jazzsequence has been featured on DesignSnack and WeLoveWP.

www.jazzsequence.com

WordPress Plugins used: Dynamic Content Gallery, SimplePie, WP-O-Matic, Apture, Audio Player, IntenseDebate, Landing Sites, Upgrade Else DIE!, WP-sIFR, Yet Another Related Posts Plugin, WPTouch iPhone Theme