andreasviklund.com

If you are using BlogEngine.NET, I am happy to announce one of my templates has now been ported into a BlogEngine.NET theme. Nikolaos Georgiou wanted to use the Daleri Structure template for his own blog, and he is sharing the theme with other BlogEngine.NET users. I have not tested it myself so I can not comment on how well it works or provide any kind of support for the theme version, so please direct any feedback you may have to Nikolaos rather than to me.

I have just uploaded a new free XHTML/CSS template, this time a somewhat different kind of design called Variant Fashion. It is not as simple as you may be used to, but it should still be easy to get familiar with. The primary difference compared to previous designs is that Variant Fashion includes a number of different layout options, as well as visual style options. You can combine any of the layouts with any of the color schemes, and you make the changes by editing a few IDs and classes in the HTML source. The template has all CSS in one single file, meaning that the stylesheet includes examples of how to customize a template into something different.

Below you can see what Variant Fashion looks like (all four screens are taken from the included HTML examples, click the image to download the template):

I will soon write a tutorial on how to use the included layout variations and color schemes, as well as explaining how to make your own adjustments. Until then, you can look at the differences between the examples, for example how the sidebar and the content divs are marked up in the two left/right sidebar examples: Moving the sidebar to the right is simply a matter of changing the sidebar div ID from "sidebar" to "sidebaralt" and the content div ID from "content" to "contentalt". In a similar fashion, to use the light style you only need to apply class="lightstyle" to the body tag. The CSS will take care of the rest.

If you find any errors or things that can be improved, feel free to post a comment or send me an e-mail through the contact page. I will add more visual styles and color schemes to this template in the future, this first version is just a basic release to see if this kind of code organization works well for template users.

The two latest templates, Variant Portal and Variant Rounded, have been available for almost two weeks now. They have been downloaded more than 1600 times since the release and live websites built from the designs are starting to appear. I have got a lot of positive feedback, as well as useful comments on missing features and possible improvements for both templates. I have made some updates to Variant Portal with some of the most common requests in mind, and later today I will release an updated version of it. I will also release a new template, a kind of massive one in terms of file size and features for being made by me. Stay tuned for a release announcement later today.

As a side note, I have a request. If you post comments to a blog entry on andreasviklund.com, please use your own name or an established nickname rather than using keywords relevant for the site you write in the URL field. While I appreciate all kinds of feedback, I would rather get comments from people than from keywords!

And finally, two updates have been made to the site itself. The contact form is online again, feel free to use it if you want to get in touch with me directly. Just make sure that I am the right person to contact, I still get a lot of e-mails about content on other peoples (template-based) websites. And the music section has been removed, with the songs now available on my purevolume.com page rather than on this website. From now on, andreasviklund.com is all about topics related to web design.

Saturday passed and it is now two hours into Sunday, so this post is a bit late. But the news will hopefully be interesting to you anyway! I have uploaded two new free website templates, called Variant Rounded and Variant Portal. As I have in the past, I try to keep the designs simple and useful. Variant Rounded is an 800px-friendly template with more design than content in its basic 3-column layout. Variant Portal is lighter, less colorful, 1024px-friendly and made for sites with more text content that needs to be in focus. Both templates have been tested in multiple web browsers and on mobile devices, and I have not found any problems. The code is valid XHTML 1.0 Strict and CSS2. Basic accessibility features are included, such as skip links and full functionality with screen readers. Like most of my previous designs, these two new templates should be perfectly functional even in browsers that do not support CSS, thanks to the simple code structure.

Screenshots are below, click the images to download each template:

As a long-time user (I started off with version 1.2 six years ago) and a big fan of the blog platform WordPress, I try to keep up with new features by testing early betas and release candidates of upcoming versions. While my own public WordPress themes are significantly outdated by now, I have built several custom-designed sites for various projects which have force me to stay updated on what happens with the WordPress core. And for every new release, I get more and more impressed by the contributing developers and their ability to add features which I didn't know that I needed – but which is incredibly useful once they are included.

A few days ago, version 3.0 was released. I had tested pre-release versions of it for a couple of months but not used it to build any live website, and sure it looked good. But when I moved on from just testing and started building something more serious, I realized that WordPress has gone way past being just a blog engine. The new features in 3.0 includes a new way of managing navigation menus, and it didn't take long for me to realize that the new menu system is a tool that will cut down the time it takes to build more advanced websites dramatically. It will also make it a lot easier for site owners and bloggers to manage their sites and blogs. Justin Tadlock (creator of the brilliant Hybrid Theme) has written a great article about the new custom menu feature, and it is recommended reading for anyone interested in theme development and good inspiration for me.

Upcoming releases

The plan for the upcoming weekend is to upload two new free website templates. I will do the final fixing and testing of them during the next two days, and if everything works out well I will upload the first of the two on Saturday the 26th. I will also publish an article about the ideas I have for including mobile-friendly (and touch screen optimized) layouts in the templates, and then release the second template on Sunday. Look back in a few days to see new material!