Awesome site redesign, progress report – the first week.

Last Monday I told you about an awesome site redesign that I’m going to be working on for the next month – A WordPress theme for my oldest Christmas site, Jinglebell Junction.

Since then, I’ve managed to get a lot of the design work out of the way – even though that’s completely opposite of my original plan of getting the functionality in place first. It’s nice to see it all coming together, I’m off to a great start but it’s not been a cake walk.

To get the ball rolling, my first stop was the WordPress theme development codex. Than a trip over to The ThemeShaper WordPress Theme Tutorial: 2nd Edition.

I already had a general color scheme in mind.. two blues, a deep red, green and brown.

colorschemeThings went well the first few days and I managed to get the basic theme files together and started on the graphics and the style sheet. By Wednesday, I had a functional theme with a really cute look happening.

JBJElves-hugeass-screenshot

Thursday’s fiasco consisted of a straight 2 hours of hell trying to get the search button to display the way I wanted. Frankly, it’s still not exactly how I wanted it, I had to settle… but not really, I’ll just come back to it later 🙂

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On Friday I worked on the login page. Since there are multiple users I want the login screen to match the site. Check out How To Customize The WordPress Login Page and this great tutorial How To Create A Totally Custom WordPress Login Page.

ScreenShot116The default WordPress login screen is just a little drab, so I took it from boring, to Christmassy!
 
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I’m really happy with what I’ve got done so far. Have any suggestions? I’d love to hear what you think, so hit me up in the comments.

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