WordPress 2.5 And New Design

I upgraded to the highly anticipated WordPress 2.5 yesterday, and this marks my first post with the greatly revised back-end. My my, have things changed. It’s very slick back here, and the biggest change to the admin section since I began using WP (somewhere in the nether regions of version <1.0). I'm looking forward to seeing what the 'aftermarket' will come up with in terms of redesigning the admin section as it's now fully and more easily themeable.

Speaking of designs, I was hoping to whip up something new for my site's theme with the upgrade to 2.5. I use MAMP to run a virtual server on my laptop so that I can theme and change things without affecting the live site. I’ve been running a 2.5 release candidate on it for a few days, but never got around to doing serious work on a theme. (I had a pretty good one going for awhile, but overwrote it in a really boneheaded move.)

So I set about looking for something new and attractive, fresh. I ended up at this Smashing Magazine article showcasing 15 of the latest, greatest WP themes. They were all very eye-catching. But after rooting around Smashing and a few very excellent web designer websites who gracefully release free WP themes, I realized that for all of their coding and design prowess, the actual designs are far from usable. The trend is moving away from easy access and readability towards… What? Amazing design that’s amazingly difficult to use. The main content is buried and obscured by huge splash graphics and marginally useful sidebars.

How can a website like Smashing Magazine dedicate itself to design topics that I (as a relative newb) barely understand, and then go and use a design that’s so infuriatingly hard to use? Where the main content takes up less than half of the page?

Design for the sake of it? No thanks.

I don’t even mean to call out Smashing Mag. I just discovered the site and it looks to be a great resource. What I didn’t want to do was single out some designer who’s making free professional-grade themes for WP (and whose site I personally felt reeks).

But whatever. I’m currently using a very slightly modified (revised header and slightly wider) version of InSense by Design Disease. It’s appealing, easy on the eyes, and allows the viewer to focus on the content.

Maybe one of these days I’ll get inspired and hack away some more. Till then.