andreasviklund.com

With the opening of the new official WordPress theme directory on WordPress.org, you will see a number of changes on my WordPress themes page. I will have as many of my themes hosted on the theme site as possible, and I am now uploading the themes as they are updated. Two themes have been approved so far, WP-Andreas01 (updated to v2.0) and the new Daleri Sweet. 1024px is awaiting its review and approval and will probably be added in a few days.

You can see live previews of the themes, grade them and find many other good themes on the site, and it is well worth a visit even though the number of themes is low so far. All themes are reviewed in detail before approval to ensure that they meet the requirements for being hosted on WordPress.org. All my approved themes are listed on my userpage, and you can also subscribe to the andreas tag to stay updated on new releases and updates.

Are you a US citizen and currently attending a full time post-secondary education? Do you build WordPress themes? Then you should read this entry carefully for a chance to win a $5.000 scholarship from CollegeScholarships.org!

College Scholarships are launching a new WordPress-based site called New Scholarships and the site needs a new and fresh design. In order to get that, a web design contest is launched where participants can create and submit entries - which need to be in the form of complete WordPress themes. A number of well-known web design profiles (including Paul Stamatiou, Steve Smith, Darius A Monsef IV, Bryan Veloso, Darren Rowse, Jonathan Snook and me!) will review the entries and find the best entry. The winner will recieve a $5.000 scholarship from The Daniel Kovach Scholarship Foundation!

The deadline for submissions is very close: August 13th (midnight PST), and there is currently not many entries so this is really a good challenge for those of you who can take it on! Besides the chance of winning a scholarship, you will get your work reviewed by people who truly know the art of web design…

Entries are submitted via the form on the the scholarship site . If you have any questions, there is more information and contact information on that site as well. Since I am one of the judges, I can't answer any questions or give any recommendations. But the directions are clear: Make a good theme for the new scholarship site, and hope for the best. Good luck!

Please spread the word!

Since the release of the first two Daleri themes for WordPress I have got a number of requests from users of other blogging tools, asking me to release versions of the designs for Blogger and sNews among other systems. Extracting the design from the WordPress themes can be a bit hard, so I will do it for you and release both theme designs as regular XHTML/CSS-templates as well. If anyone who reads this would want to do a port of the template, let me know and I'll send it over as soon as it is ready.

Here it is, my own version of the Daleri Selection theme that I presented in the previous post. I am perfectly sure that lots of pages, posts and details are broken on my site right now, so please don't shout too loud if you run into something that doesn't work. I'll spend the next couple of days on reviewing all pages to make sure that everything works…

So, what about the new look? Well, first of all, it has a third column and needs a screen width of 1024px to look well. I know that leaving 800px behind is a sensitive point, but according to my site statistics very few of the site visitors are still running 800px. Feel free to protest if you don't like this change, feedback is always welcome. The sidebars will be organized in a better way than before, so it will be easier to browse subpages to the different site sections. The main menu will contain fewer links that will lead to site sections (like "MP3 music", "Website templates" and so on), and each site section will have a number of subpages (for example: "andreas01" and "andreas02" under the templates section) that you will be able to access through a subpage menu in the left sidebar. I will also open up the possibility to get sponsored links on other pages than the frontpage - something I have not had before that many have asked for. The sidebar parts are still not completed, so the sidebars may be a bit confusing right now.

And what more? Well, some new colors, some new styles. The content area is wider (600px instead of 540px), which will allow me to post larger images among other things. As mentioned before I will add lots of content pages, one page for each template and theme - with additional material for every release. I will also put direct links to the latest theme and template release in the sidebar so that it is easy to download the latest design. But more about that later. For now, the main priority is to make sure that the basic site features and pages are functional!

Let me know what you think of the changes. And don't read out too much from the header photo, I will explain the background of it in my next post!

Edit: …and it validates!

Edit 2: I know it has no significance in reality, but andreasviklund.com now has a higher Technorati authority than the three most popular blogs in the world (Engadget, Boing Boing and Gizmodo). My technorati rank is #4, which means that there are three blogs in the Technorati universe that has more incoming links than this site - but which are also excluded from the top 100 blogs list. This is useless trivia since the majority of my incoming links are from people who use my designs, but still very cool numbers.

Edit 3: I got to get some sleep. Most things should work now, but the archive will be down for today. I've left the monthly archive links in the sidebar in case someone wants to read older posts, but those links will be removed once the archive page is functional again. Contact form and commercial templates should also work now.

The second theme in the Daleri design series has now been quietly and carefully released, so I can get some feedback on it. You can download Daleri Selection at the official WordPress Theme Viewer, and on popular demant I chose to release the more advanced 3-column version with a horizontal page menu instead of the more simple 2-column version that you can see on the Daleri.com site. Please let me know if you find some errors or problems, or if you miss some important feature that should be there.

This new theme is also the base for my new site design, which will be launched later today. Don't expect it to be much cooler than the theme, you should know by know that I like simple, functional and useful designs rather than flashy and impressive stuff. But there will be a few upgrades. For example, I've spent many hours on the header image! I have also added a widget which I think should be included with WordPress by default, the subpages widget (which is very useful if you use Daleri Selection).

Proper releases, screenshots and additional information about both the WP-themes Daleri Dark and Daleri Selection and their XHTML/CSS-based template versions will follow quickly after the new theme goes live. I'm not very happy about adding content before I switch to the new theme, so the next you see here will be the new look.