I suppose you’re wondering how a web designer can have such an un-designed website. What is with these default-colored purple and blue links?

For a number of reasons, I recently decided to hit the reset button on my website (several of these reasons you can read about in my earlier post Dilemman). But the one reason that I’m taking up in this particular post, is that I found the design of my website took precedence over everything else. This was just plain bass-ackwards. I’ve done numerous make-overs on my website in the past, and as far back as I can remember, design was always my first and foremost concern. This time, I’m challenging myself to do the exact opposite.

However, one aspect of the design that I decided to make an exception for is typesetting and in my viewpoint that includes the font. I liked the font of WordPress’ current default theme Twenty Eleven, so I copied it.

I wanted to take advantage of WordPress’ native capabilities as much as possible. I also wanted my website to easily adapt to future technologies as they are evolving. So some of the things that I considered most important for my new theme included:

• A primary menu with drop-down submenus, manageable from the admin Menu page
• At least one widgetized area
• That it is built using currently supported HTML5 and is semantically correct
• That it maintains W3C validity throughout development

I also wanted to save time and start with the theme that was stripped down and didn’t have any CSS coding and already. I figured something like this had probably been developed by others already and I could probably find one it the WordPress theme installer. I looked and sure enough, there it was— Toolbox.

That’s pretty much outlines the beginning stage of my new WordPress theme. Stay tuned and I’ll continue to post progress updates as I keep my itchy design hand strapped to the chair.