I would never say to anyone that I am a designer, but over the past seven months I have learned a lot about design. My whole life designing things has kind of been a hobby for me. Whether it came in the form of photography, scrapbooks or just silly little gifts for friends (like writing song parodies and putting them on a poster as a joke), I have always enjoyed playing with aesthetics. Because of this little hobby of mine I tend to get somewhat annoyed when I can’t have things looking the way I want them to look.
Over the past three months specifically I have started using many new web technologies that I find fun and exciting. These include websites such as pbwiki, Twitter and, of course, wordpress.com. With pbwiki my design options are limited, but seeing as the primary aspect of pbwiki is to communicate with peers and manage projects, it is not something that will deter me from using this site. With Twitter I can change the colours and background images for my account pretty much limitlessly. The one website that I am having some frustration with is – you guessed it – wordpress.
I have always had my doubts about blogging and am still not sure if it is something I really want to do, but I have to wonder if my design frustration is affecting this attitude. In my opinion, a personal blog should reflect your personal attitudes and opinions. However, I feel that I cannot express myself visually with wordpress.
Don’t get me wrong, wordpress has many great features. For someone who has never blogged before I have had practically no trouble learning how to use the widgets, create pages and publish posts. My only frustration with the site is the fact that I am limited to pre-set wordpress themes.
WordPress itself has a limited amount of themes that you can choose for free. To be specific, there are actually 87 themes to choose from, but am I the only one who can’t find the perfect look? It seems to me that whenever I find a layout that I like I don’t like the colours, or the fonts, or it doesn’t support a widget that I want to use. It seems to me that I just can’t get what I want out of wordpress!
Now I know that there are websites out there where I can find other wordpress themes (like at socialcmsbuzz.com), but all the ones I like seem to cost money, and (I know I am being a little pessimistic here) I am sure that if I went ahead and purchased a theme that I would find something I wanted to change but couldn’t.
Out of the 87 free themes that wordpress offers there are quite a few that have customizable colours or header images, so why don’t all of them? Why do only some of them support certain widgets (like subscribe RSS) or have customizable column widths? I remember being in high school at age 15 and starting a personal web page. I can’t remember what supported it, or even if it’s still out there, but I do remember being able to choose fonts, sizes and colours. In this fascinating world of web2.0, is it so much to ask to be able to change my fonts to something that I like?
This is my call for a new era. The era of “Content Management and Customization Systems” for those of us who do not know how to code or create our own themes.
Vote in the poll below or post a comment to let us know what you think.
Would you like to see more customizable wordpress themes?
( online surveys)
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