I went for something VERY different this time. What do you all think?

EDIT February 28th
Also, I think there may have been a bug in Wordpress 2.3. When, I installed the new theme it kept randomly switching back out to the default theme. I first tried removing the default theme, but that didn’t work. Then it switched out to no theme at all.

I think I have finally found a solution, I removed all my unused plugins, upgraded all the out of date plugins, and upgraded my wordpress. As of now it seems to be working fine. Sorry for the downtime.

Features:
- Valid css and xhtml
- Encrypted links.
- Works in FF, IE, Safari, and Opera.
- Sideblog.
- Widget ready.

Demo
Download it here!

Features:
- Valid css and xhtml
- Encrypted links.
- Works in FF, IE, Safari, and Opera.
- Unique, scalable header.
- Widget ready.

Demo
Download it here!

Features
- Valid css and xhtml
- Encrypted footer.
- Works in FF, IE, Safari, and Opera.
- Very unique post display.
- Comes with pre-made logo (easy to switch out).

Demo
Download it here!

If you are a person who is switching from Windows to Mac, or plans to, this post is for you. I have just made the switch and already I am LOVING it. Of course there are many differences I have yet to get used to.

The first problem I encountered was the lack of Internet Explorer for testing websites. I quickly found IE 5 for mac here: http://browsers.evolt.org/?ie/mac/5.2.3_OS_X. The only problem is that this version of Internet Explorer is VERY outdated. After searching for a while I found what I believe to be the best solution. It is called ies4osx.

The next, and possibly biggest problem I ran into was that I had Photoshop CS2 on my Windows based computer, and needed some version of Photoshop on my Mac. My first solution was to run Bootcamp, but I really didnt’ want to do that for the threat of viruses. I thought about buying Photoshop Elements to save on money. I didn’t want to have to buy the full version for Mac. That would have cost almost $700, as you probably know. I then found out about something called a cross-grade.

A cross-grade is where you pay the upgrade price, but switch operating systems. The only way to do this is to call Adobe (800-833-6687). You have to fill out a “form of destruction” that says you won’t use your old copy of Photoshop. Then they send you the full version of Photoshop in your new operating system; in my case Macintosh.

Features:
It’s 100% free.
Widget ready.
Valid xhtml and css.
Very stylish and unique.

Demo
Download it here!

You know that outline that is surrounds links after they’ve been clicked? Find it annoying? Here is how to get rid of it.

It’s as simple as that. Of course, this may confuse some people as to whether they actually clicked the link, but from a design standpoint it looks much nicer. To fix this problem you could just add an active state to the link.

Everyday I run home to my computer, and check out the 20+ css and web galleries I am subscribed to. There is no doubt all the sites that are featured are nice sites, but most of them just aren’t memorable. So I decided to try and figure out what it actually was that made these few sites stand out.

The first thing I noticed was color scheme.
To me, I tend to forget most of the “organic” colored websites. By organic I mean dark shades of green, browns, and possibly desaturated shades of blue. I’m not saying these are bad colors. I’m just saying that these seem to stand out much less than websites which use other colors. Besides organic colors, almost all other colors stood out the same to me. The only variation in this pattern came with erraticwisdom. This site uses a black and white color scheme with one very bright accent color (yellow). This use of colors definitely made erraticwisdom stand out much more than any other site I saw that day.

The next thing I noticed was the use of typography.
Most sites use the same exact typographic patterns. Again, erraticwisdom is a perfect example of a site that varies from this pattern. Erraticwisdom uses large post titles that grab your attention very quickly. Another example of good typography is BienBienBien. They used an organic color scheme very effectively here, and backed it up with very nice typography. They use almost newspaper style fonts, but the titles stand out because of their boldness. Also, on rollover, the titles are emphasized with a red background. This makes the design “pop” even more.

I noticed while making a Wordpress theme that the code I was using on the link elements of a list added a lot of extra whitespace in Internet Explorer.
Here was my code:
CSS

HTML

After a lot of experimenting, I finally figured out a solution. I kept the html code exactly the same, but I added this to the css:

I hope this helps out some people.
-Greg