CodeSipper - Vancouver BC Website Design and Development

One of my goals is to become a good WordPress theme developer. There are some amazing themes out there by some very talented developers covering as many styles and walks of life you could ever imagine. I strive to join them.

WordPress is an incredible platform that was founded by Matt Mullenweg and Mike Little back in 2003, as an open source blogging platform. 10 years on it is so much more than that, still open source but would you believe that it now powers more than 17% of all websites on the Internet. That totals to more than 66 million websites, here’s just a few of them you may have heard of. CNN, NBC Sports, Forbes, Yahoo!, The New York Times, Ford, Flickr, TechCrunch, eBay, UPS, Sony, Reuters, these are all WordPress VIP customers. Now that’s an impressive list.

I’m currently working on a theme I’m calling “Howard Theme” and hope to have it up and running and ready to download pretty soon. I’m trying to make it very clean and clear looking but also having a visual impact that draws you inside to navigate around it. I see so many sites that are cluttered and heavy on the eye, they just make me want to move on quickly. I feel the essence of a good site is ease of navigation with a clear and uncluttered look.

Once I have the static site how I want it I will upload it as a WordPress theme and see what users think of it. Hopefully I’ll get a few downloads. I’ll let you know!

I feel I’m moving on in leaps and bounds with CSS recently but there’s one area that I’m having to really get my head around, “floated elements”. When you float an element, like a heading, paragraph, list or div, it becomes a block container. This container can then be shifted left or right of the current line by using the markup “float: left” or “float:right”. Other content can then flow down the right hand side of a float-left box and the left hand side of a float-right box. You always need to set a width for your floated element, if you don’t set a width then you can get some unpredictable outcomes.

It also took me a while to get straight in my mind that, for example, you may have floated a containing element to the right but all of the contents of that element will still have normal document flow within that container. So if you want the contents of the container also to float right then you would also need to apply that syntax to that element as well. Sounds easy, right?

Another problem with floating elements is that the parent element does not recognize its child’s height. This means that the parent will lose its height if it only get its height from the height of its child. When this happened to me for the first time it had me scratching my head for a while. The answer is to apply the mark up “overflow:hidden” to the parent element. The parent element will then recognize the height of its child and all will look great. Got it? I did have to wash, rinse and repeat this one a few times to make it stick.