Carrot Lite available in WordPress Theme Directory
I’m happy to announce that the Carrot Lite theme finally made it’s way to the WordPress Theme Directory. And a long way it was, as this is my first approach to contribute to the official WordPress community.
The idea
The idea behind Carrot Lite was to create a lightweight (both in terms of bandwidth load and appearance) theme fit for a blog or a news site. The main requirement I set for this theme was readability and accessibility no matter what device or browser is used to browse it.
Features
Carrot Lite is a modern HTML5 and CSS3 responsive theme, ready for the plethora of various devices used these days by site visitors, thus ensuring that the content is available for anybody, anywhere.
Its design is focused on content, so it deliberately doesn’t contain much eye-candy. Instead I used large and highly legible typography and subtle tones of grey to separate the elements from each other. The theme also has the Font Awesome icon font built in to improve the appearance at a lowest possible bandwidth cost.
To increase flexibility Carrot Light is equipped with an optional home page template (a post grid instead of list) and two areas for widgets: sidebar (no surprise) and footer. It also has the possibility of putting a jumbo message on the home page to let the user have more impact on their visitors.
Also the image gallery experience is improved by the Magnific Popup plugin that lets you browse the images in a comfortable way.
How it was built
The Carrot Lite theme wasn’t designed. At least in terms of drawing the GIMP/Photoshop images. I had quite a fuzzy idea of how the theme should look and slowly put it to life element by element, using only the browser and code editor. Each idea was tested, refined and thrown away or left in the theme if it was good enough. From time to time I stopped the work and came back to it after a couple of days to keep the ability to look critically at the product to make sure everything looks and works as intended.
After all the decisions were made I named the theme. The name comes from the appearance of the theme – the light design and the main colour used for elements that should stand out.
No design? What the…
Some of you probably find my design/development process strange. Let me explain why I chose it.
- The theme was intended not to use any graphics for decoration, so I didn’t need to prepare any graphical elements for it.
- The designer and developer were the same person. So they didn’t need to communicate any ideas by means of graphics.
- It was easier to change the appearance of things by altering a few HTML/CSS lines than to do it on a graphic design in GIMP.
- It’s faster – any idea is judged in the browser, so if it’s good it’s already implemented, no need to recreate it from a graphic file. This applies especially to visual changes of responsive elements.
OK, now what?
Now the theme is available for anybody to download. It’ll be improved (I already have some ideas) when I have some spare time (now I’m a little overworked so the theme has to wait). Apart from that, it has already been lucky enough to be mentioned on some design blogs:
Oh, and there will be more themes. Creating things is fun!