My websites have received a bit of a facelift over the last week as I’ve rolled out my first ever WordPress theme built from scratch, which I’ve titled after where it was built: Aberdeen.
It’s been designed from the underscores template, which gives the barest of bones from which to build a functional WordPress theme. With a bit of graft I’ve managed to put together what I think is a pretty stylish theme which I’m pretty happy with!
I wanted something that looked similar to the websites I’d built already, and I tried to make a style that was as clean and simple as possible, but with subtle features to it that make it stand out a bit more than a basic theme would. My goal was to make my content, which are blog posts, look as good as possible and be as readable as it could be. I also wanted it to be easy for users to move round the site and find other pieces that I’ve done.
So this theme features things like a responsive layout that looks great on all devices, a sticky navigation bar that holds at the top of the screen when you scroll, bundled Font Awesome icons which look great, custom social sharing bar at the bottom of each article so people can spread my articles far and wide and it also comes with minified CSS and JavaScript files, which most WordPress themes don’t, so that it loads just that bit faster. I’ve also added in functionality for author profiles, which make it especially useful for multi-user blogs.
I’ve made two versions of the theme to suit different sorts of website users. The basic free version, or plain version as I’m calling it, comes with the same style and most of the same features – but because of WordPress limitations it doesn’t feature the same behind-the-scenes customisation options that people might like to use to change their site to suit them.
The Plus version does though, coming with a theme options panel courtesy of Redux Framework that lets you tweak the layout of your site in many ways and choose between either one of 10 vibrant colour schemes inspired by Google’s UI design recommendations or to make your own. It also features native WooCommerce support so you can start selling products with it straight away!
It’s been great fun building this theme, and now it’s ready for anyone else who wants to use it!
You can download both versions of the theme from my site here:
I’m working to get the free version of the Aberdeen WordPress theme on WordPress.org shortly and will soon submit the Aberdeen Plus WordPress theme to Themeforest, where hopefully you’ll be able to buy from as well!
This is just the start for this theme, as I’ve got a lot of features I’d like to add included more layout options, more colour schemes and streamlining the existing options. You can check out the ongoing progress of the theme on it’s dedicated page here.
Let me know what you think in the comments below, or if you have any feature suggestions or bugs that need fixing too (although hopefully there’s not any!). You can also get in touch with me through my Contact Me page.