Launching the new Design120

Posted on 05. Nov, 2008 by Sean OBrien in Design

I’ve always been a big follower of Adii Rockstar, so when he got WooThemes started I thought it cool to do a mod of FreshFolio theme (by WooThemes) rather than code a complete site myself. Not to say that I couldn’t do this myself, but during the past few weeks I’ve been on the road through Europe for windsurfing and have hardly enough time to sit and build a complete new website. Modifying a theme is actually a little more fun as you can spend more time on the fun things like semantics, aesthetics, graphics, colour and fung-shui. Which for someone like me, who’s more interested in the front-end of the website than tinkering in the back-end, this is actually pretty cool.

I started by taking out the standard two-tone Woo background and used a stock photo of a tree-trunk I found somewhere. I seem to be doing a lot of websites with the background-attachment: fixed; (which makes the background stay fixed in one spot, and the content scrolls over the top – cool effect!) but I just really like this effect!

Then I used a 1px transparent .png with 50% transparency as a background filler for each of the boxes on the main page. I also changed the fonts of some of the headings and removed the borders. Wasn’t a whole lot of work, but I think the finished product deviates enough from the original theme to make it worthwhile.

I wonder what people think about using somebody else’s theme (albeit, a paid Premium theme) on a website that’s showcasing your own webdesign skills? I guess the market these days is looking for cheaper, more professionally looking websites made in the shortest time possible and modifying themes seems to fulfill these requirements much more cost-effectively than completely coding a website yourself (which is kinda a lot of work!).