Theme Research
As I put together my final project for SMAD 203, I have decided to make a website to showcase my portfolio. Here is some of the theme research I conducted to pick a layout that best suits my needs.
Rebalance
My content is mainly photography and writing. To showcase that, I was looking for a theme that had a good balance. this theme reminded me of the way news websites display their content with an image for each story.
Maryland
I really liked the look of Mayland. However, it was almost completely images. I need a way to display my writing within my website.
Independent Publisher
Independent reader looks like it would suit a site with lots of text. This may be a good direction fro me later after I have more of my writing published. However, currently more of my work is visual.
Adaline
I really like the look of this theme. It merges color, text, and images very well. I think tis would be a great way for me to display my content. However, it is not free. Therefore I kept looking.
Ryu
After dozens of themes, I finally found this one. Ruy was a perfect match of text and visuals. It was not too buys so the images could stand, but still had good readable fonts. This will be a good way for me to display my content.
Making my website
Once I selected my theme, I had to customize it. This theme is sort of set up to use the blog feed page as the home page. I wanted a separate home page, so I separated the two.
I wanted to keep it clean and sleek. To show this, I kept the type and backgroung plain black or white. This lets the images and portfolio work stand out. Keeping with the examples of the original theme, I still used a lot of galleries and cover blocks. I embedded YouTube videos under my video tab. This is an example of a widget. Another widget I used is the calandar on my homepage.
Madison Heiser 