New Theme : Light, Simple & Fast


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As you can see, I changed the theme of this blog with a new theme. If you have visited css-tricks.com, you can see there are similarities to it’s theme and mine. I really liked Chris Coyer’s theme and I contacted him to lend me the theme. But, no response. So, I decided that I should create my own theme.

By WordPress Support forum, I found _s site. Underscores provide a starter theme for WordPress. It can be downloaded, make changes as we like. I downloaded it and made it in to this awesome theme. I’m calling this theme Subin’s Blog V1.

Version 1 of Subin's Blog Theme

Version 1 of Subin’s Blog Theme

The Navigation menu is mixed with colors and it has a drop down with the same color as that of the parent navigation link.

Features

Responsive

The theme was created to be responsive to all screen sizes. I don’t have a smart phone, but when I resize the window it’s adapting to the screen size. Here are some screenshots of the theme in different screen resolutions.

Mobile Display

Mobile Display
On a 640x480 resolution
On a 640×480 resolution

 

On a 1024x768 resolution

On a 1024×768 resolution

Light

The theme was created to be light. It has only 500 lines of CSS code which is served compressed in the blog. The whole theme is of size 85 KB and most of the files in the theme is not used. So the actual size of theme is less than 85 KB.

The theme doesn’t cause any PHP errors as far as I tested. So, the error log is comparitevely small.

No jQuery

By default, WordPress loads jQuery on every pages. But, on this theme I have disabled the loading of jQuery because no component of the theme needs jQuery. Even the navigation drop down feature is made possible by CSS. Widgets that uses jQuery was replaced with native JavaScript and due to this, page loads more fast.

Fast

Pages using the theme loads comparitevely fast. According to the test ran using Pingdom, page loads 98 % faster than all tested websites. You can see the full report here.

The page load time is less because there is no loading of jQueryjQuery Migrate and other silly JavaScript files. I’m really happy with this theme. But there are some bugs in there somewhere. When I think it’s all perfect, I may post the code on GitHub.

Cross Browser Support

I have tested the theme on different browsers. Almost all of the browsers give positive result as I expected. Firefox 9.0 didn’t render the site properly probably because it doesn’t support HTML 5. I haven’t tested this on IE. But, why should I ? Who uses IE anymore ?

Help

If you found any flaws or problem with the theme, please please report it to me via comments or by sending an email to [email protected]

Version 1 of Subin’s Blog Theme

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