Wait for it…
Getting this design right is going to take me some time today (working on it around other stuff). I’m having to refamiliarize myself with how WordPress does themes, so bear with me as things look wonky, weird, or just plain wrong.
Aaaaaaaaaaaagh! I just don’t have the patience right now to relearn all the ins and outs of CSS minutae that is required to make a WP theme look good. This is one thing I really hated about WP before. I was able to toss together a simple CSS layout for my quilt page with no problem, but dealing with WP and widgets and this plugin and that page and this bit and that bit…BLAAH.
I like the image used in this current theme, but it needs serious tweaking (as all free themes do), so I guess I’ll start fiddling here. Starting with the header (adding my blog’s name in a more attractive way) and then moving on to headers, etc.
Site design used to amuse me. Now pixeling amuses me and design irritates me. (Fadi, I know you’re feeling my pain.)
ETA: Funny how it is possible to find a solution when you’re not looking for one. One thing that has always bugged me about CSS design and especially WP is that there isn’t any way to see what you’re laying out until you upload it & view it live. I was so used to making webpages in a WYSIWYG editor that switching to CSS was difficult—because I need to be able to see, immediately, what my changes are doing. I was just now browsing around for any other possible themes I might like, because I’m not in the mood for the learning curve of translating my own ideas into WP’s way of doing things—mainly because the tedium of make change-upload-view-make another change-upload-view etc etc etc drives me batty—when I found a way to mess with CSS with a “live” view! On this blog post, the author explains that the Firefox addon “Firebug” allows you to change CSS on a page and see that change right away, without changing the actual page yet. *goes to download*
Dammit. I might plow back into coding my own design tonight.
P.S. I know some things in this theme aren’t showing up correctly (hello, too-narrow sidebar!), but the CSS is so freaking convoluted that it’s going to take awhile (and probably a couple of cocktails) to figure out exactly how to tweak it. Firebug and Vibatinis to the rescue. Gah.