The theme I recently released on the WordPress Repository, Wordsmith Anvil, has a number of features and some custom page templates. After taking a quick look at several sites that have downloaded this theme, I have made a few observations and thought it would be a good idea to make not of a few of them.

The font size for the title is designed to be fairly large. As a result, if the title of the blog has more than 15-18 characters it will not display very well (up through version 1.6.3). If your title contains more characters, you will need to edit the file main.css, located in the stylesheets directory. Decrease the font size until your title displays correctly … or select a blog title with less characters. NOTE: You will most likely need to also adjust the height, margin and/or padding on the header elements to accommodate your changes. DOWNLOAD VERSION 1.6.6 … I fixed it for you.

I have also seen several sites where someone has attempted to edit the pages and the end result is that the pages do not display correctly. I cannot provide an easy explanation that will address every possible edit to the pages in this theme. However, the best caveat is to save a backup of the page before you attempt to edit it. That way, if you delete something that breaks the page, you can always revert to the original version of the page and try again. One of the most common errors I have seen is removing an opening <div> or a closing </div> tag; and not deleting the companion tag. Every opening tag needs a closing tag. Otherwise, you end up with unexpected results. Your sidebar may not display correctly, or maybe your footer, or the widget areas above the footer, or the page itself may not display properly.

If you would like to use any of the page templates, take a few minutes to read through the FAQs, which you can find here. Without reading the FAQs, it is not likely you will be able to setup the page templates. You will need to understand what the custom fields are, and the directory structure.

I have also seen where a different header image has been uploaded which displays a title or other text. Unless you comment out the site title in the header.php file, you will see the title of your blog displayed over the top of the text in your header image; which, is not likely your intent. I may consider adding the option to enable or disable display of the site title in a subsequent version; as I have done for the tagline, and logo.

I have also seen where people have tried to hardcode in elements that are already made available in the theme options page; or install a plugin that does not have theme styling already built in. Unless you are very comfortable editing php code and comfortable with editing stylesheets your best bet is using the theme options to perform the functions they are designed to perform. If there is not a theme option available, then feel free to make a suggestion about other functionality you would like to see in future versions of this theme. Also, you might find other plugins that will perform functions that are not already built in.

Theme options include:

• Remove those pesky auto p tags
• Custom Logo options
• Custom Header Backgrounds
• Custom Background Options
• Custom Menus
• Five Widget Areas
• Tagline Display Option
• RSS and Social Network linking options
• Feedburner Subscribe Options
• External Feed Display Option
• Coupon or Special Text Display Box Options
• Footer Links Display Options
• Copyright Text Display Option

The current version can be downloaded from the WordPress Repository. At the time of this post, the current version available for download is 1.6.2. There was a minor display issue which only affected certain versions of Internet Explorer. This was corrected in version 1.6.3. If you have downloaded 1.6.2 and are wondering how to correct the display issue, you can find the solution here.

If you have a comment on this post, feel free to leave one here. If you have questions about the theme, or would like to have the theme customized for you, then use the links above. This post was not intended to be a Q & A Forum, or support page for the theme. … However, I may not have made that clear on the theme options page until version 1.6.8. So, because of that, there are a number of Q & A and support related comments found here. For future use, to centralize the support-related threads for the Wordsmith Anvil theme, please use the Feedback & Support Forum Page on the theme’s demo site.

This WordPress theme includes a slider that utilizes the new set thumbnail functionality in WordPress 2.9.2 and later. The theme includes several options and is a two-column type theme, with a widgetized sidebar and widgetized footer.

I also created this header image of a loupe and documents that I thought I would showcase here as well.

What they wanted was a new WordPress theme that would represent their business and their connection to the local historic aspects of St Johns. Toms Skyline Design created a new site for them, which of course, includes a lot of CSS, PHP and image editing. Now they only need to begin re-adding content. Good Luck to everyone over at Plews Brews.

The site I have been working on is for a local organic restaurant in the St Johns area of Portland, Oregon. Angel, the owner of the restaurant, The LadyBug Cafe, was in need of a face-lift …

and talked with another St Johns business owner, Jeffrey Selin of the Dojo Creative Agency and they decided to make the switch. Jeffrey and the Dojo, whom I perform behind the scene Web & WordPress Development for, asked me to help him make the face-lift for the Ladybug site become a reality.

And … Woila … here it is

[UPDATE: Sadly, a few months later this establishment in the St Johns area closed its doors and went out of business]

However, nine modules are in the Proposed Recommendation stage.

However, historically one of the problems with CSS and the various web browsers is that one browser will support some of the standards and not others, and likewise another browser may support a subset of those standards, or a completely different set of standards. So, building sites that render the same way in each of the popular browsers becomes rather tricky. At the time of this post, it appears that Google Chrome 4.1.x is the most compatible with the current stages of the many CSS3 modules. Unfortunately, from the perspective of the designer or developer, as of February, 2010, Google Chrome only accounts for a little less than 12% of all browsers. However, we could see those numbers change in the future. In fact, statistics show it was only a few years ago that over 55% of all web surfers were using Internet Explorer (IE5, IE6 & IE7) and only 36% were using Firefox. The latest results show that Firefox has nearly 47% of the browser market; while IE8, IE7 & IE6 all combined for only about 35% of the browser market. For many web designers this is a good trend because traditionally, IE has been responsible for countless hours of additional work and headaches in the continuing efforts of web professionals working to get pages that render the same in all other browsers to render the same in IE browsers. According to Microsoft, they plan for IE9 to work much better with the CSS3 modules; getting away from the proprietary nightmares in their pre-IE9 browsers. However, the downside is that with IE9 they will not be supporting Windows XP. So, this may backfire on Microsoft. The other major browsers, Google Chrome, Mozilla Firefox, Sarari and even Opera support XP. Plus, in potentially 70% of the world, PC users are still using XP and have not upgraded (term used loosely) to Windows Vista or even to Windows 7. From a designer/developer perspective I will be happy when the proprietary prefixes are not needed and multiple hacks in order to get a page to render the same in one browser as in another.

Also, over the years the display size and color depth that a designer needs to take into consideration have varied considerably. 640 x 480 resolution used to be popular. Then it was 800 x 600 which was most popular. Then 1024 x 768 became a popular screen resolution. Along with this we saw the color depth go from 8 bits, to 16 bits and now 24 to 32 bits is most common. Of course, when there was a large enough demographic using each of those three display resolutions and color depths many companies and website owners would want pages to load the same for each resolution; and colors to be consistent with the lowest common denominator of color depth. With newer technology and wide screen displays, as of January of this year, the 1024 x 768 resolution only accounted for 20% of the current screen size; while a whopping 76% were at higher resolution rates … with 1280 x 1024 being the most common.