Recently Ruth asked me to set up a new website for her and some other textile artists who she has met. So I set up Use Your Eyes for them. Ruth was quite taken with the design, and decided she wanted her own blog Sew2Speak changing to use a similar skin, which is what I spent this weekend doing.
Both blogs use WordPress, which makes changing the template that defines the appearance of the blog very easy, while maintaining a very high level of flexibility to make individual changes.
One template which has become quite widely used is the thematic template, developed by Ian Stewart. This can either be used directly, which is what I did for this blog (developing some visual ideas from the Bible Scholar theme), or you can use templates which build on the thematic template itself. I used the Atahualpa theme from BytesForAll as the starting point. This theme is so customisable that you can change the appearance extensively without having to know hardly any CSS. If you compare Ruth’s blogs with the standard appearance of Atahualpa, you can see how much the appearance can be changed.
