Archive for Design
· Filed under Amsterdamn, Design, Themes, Wordpress·
Today is a day of change. Daylight Savings Time has begun, and we all know what that means : The summer is coming. The following months will be all about innovations and transitions for Amsterdamn.org and myself. And if you ask me, this asks for a new theme. So without further adue , I’m proud to present Amsterdamn Version 3.
I will also try to invest more time in writing, i seem to have neglected that aspect ( of the website ). last year it was all about the releases, this year, however, i will try to write more about things concerning wordpess for example and other things that tickle my fancy.
Without further ado, Amsterdamn version 3!
Leave a comment and let me know what you think of the new design…….
( Also please leave a comment if you find an error.)
· Filed under Design, Themes, Wordpress·
This is a new Wordpress theme by me. I have been working on this theme the last few weeks. And it’s a bit different than the other themes that I did. I tried to use a new style for my theme. I hope you like it.
Download | Test run
Let me know how it looks! I’m a bit afraid that it doesn’t look that great at smaller resolutions.
· Filed under Design, Themes, Wordpress·
Here are some new themes that have been uploaded in the meanwhile since I posted the last batch of Wordpress themes.
This theme has a real web 2.0 look to it. You could use it for you tech blog that uses Wordpress.
Download | Test run
Rather simple design, but if that’s what you are looking for then it rocks.
Download | Test run
Lovely usage of colours
Download | Test run
Nice and compact design, you can change the header if you want to.
Download | Test run
While we’re at it: I’m currently busy with a new design for Amsterdamn. The current look and feel doesn’t do it for me anymore. Stay tuned for the third version of Amsterdamn.
· Filed under Design, Themes, Wordpress·
I will be plugging other Wordpress theme creators as of today. Thanks to the new users on the themes.wordpress.net website there has been a huge amount of new themes. This is a good development for the community. But it also has some cons. The “good” themes don’t get noticed anymore because they are on page 2 after ~12 hours. I will take a look at the themes and give you a quick overview which themes are worth using. If you are willing to help me with creating the list: leave a comment.
Anyways, here we go:
Download | Test run
Download | Test run
Download | Test run
Download | Test run
Download | Test run
We just started doing this, therefore we decided to start with the first 5 pages and work our way up.
· Filed under Design, Themes, Wordpress·
Another new theme by Amsterdamn: Stalingrad
It supports widgets and besides that it’s xhtml and css valid.
Download
Test run
Please leave your trackbacks and comments here!
Update:
I have changed the background of the theme. Although I liked the previous one, I believe that this one is much better.
Update 2:
I have been playing around with the code and have been able to reduce it.This means that the theme will be faster to load on your website. Besides that I have also optimized the theme for search engines. This way your website will be better indexed and have a higher ranking. But I also took a look at the design of the theme.
I have edited and adjusted some parts of the design. This way the theme will look even better on your weblog. You can download the updated version of the theme above.
Please note that the screenshot on themes.wordpress.net isn’t the correct one. The one that you see here above is the correct one. We will keep on updating our themes, so be sure to check out this website once in a while.
· Filed under Design, Themes, Wordpress·
Gray Wolf is a simple yet powerful theme for Wordpress.
It supports gravatar, wp page navi and widgets. And it’s valid xhtml 1.0 strict
Screenshot:
Demo
Download
You can leave your feedback here.
Update 1:
I changed the way the look of the title. And I also added a description to the top of the theme. Besides that I have centered the menu. Also fixed some minor issues with the colours of the theme.
Update 2:
I had to remove widgets support for the theme because it didn’t work well together with page nav. I will be dropping page nav support in the next release of the theme. But it will have widgets support in return.
Update 3:
Instead of page nav it now has the standard browsing features of Wordpress. Just use the download link above to download the widget friendly version.
Please leave a comment if you have any problems with the Gray Wolf theme. I’m looking forward to fix it. This way we can improve the user experience for you and your visitors.
· Filed under Design, Internet, Themes, Wordpress·
I hope everyone had a great holiday, I know I did.
2007 is an exciting year for me from a business and personal life perspective.
But I’ll stick to the business side of the story on this blog. Amsterdamn had an incredible growth last year.
And I’m planning to work even harder to release free themes for the masses.
Amsterdamn in 2007 will be this:
- Search Engine optimization
I have been reading a lot about SEO optimization lately. And I am going to implement the knowledge that I have gathered in my new themes.
Every theme from now on will be equipped with Search Engine Optimization. Hopefully your weblog will get more exposure thanks to this.
- Options page
Some of you already noticed that I started to use the Wordpress Admin more and more. Every new theme in 2007 will get it’s own options page in the WP admin.
This way the users are able to edit basic things without having to edit the code. I have noticed that there a lot of novice users who use Wordpress.
With this small effort I am able to make our themes (even more) user friendly.
- Neutral themes
At least 5 of our new themes this year will be “neutral”.It will be easy to edit them and give them your own personal touch to it.
With the options page it will be also possible to choose what you want to use. In other words more whitespace!
- At least 15 new themes
Last year we managed to release 15 themes. This year I am planning to release at least the same amount.
- Wordpress
I will continue to release themes for Wordpress. There is a chance that I will port our themes to other blog platforms.
If you are eager to do the job: e-mail me!
- Widgets Support
I haven’t paid much attention to widgets. Basically because I never use them.
But there seems to be a demand for them. Therefore every new theme will compatible with widgets.
- Amsterdamn
And some goals for my own website:
- By then end of 2007 Amsterdamn.org will be at least a PR6 (and maybe a PR7)
- I will enter the Technorati Top 1000 (now 16xx)
- Amsterdamn themes will have 35K downloads at the Wordpress theme repository
- Our Alexa Rank will be lower than 150K
I’m looking forward to what 2007 will bring on the interwebs!
And here’s a new theme that I made last year:
Download | Test run
Don’t forget to leave a comment!
· Filed under Design·
Every morning in Africa, a gazelle wakes up.
It knows it must run faster than the fastest lion or it will be killed.
Every morning a lion wakes up.
It knows it must outrun the slowest gazelle or it will starve to death.
It doesn’t matter whether you are a lion or a gazelle.
When the sun comes up, you better start running.
· Filed under Design·
To use these custom userstyles, download and install the Stylish Firefox extension, and paste them into a newly created blank style. Alternatively, you can paste them into your userChrome.css file located in your Firefox profile folder.
- GoogleWebSearch.css
- GoogleImageSearch.css
- GoogleVideo.css
- YouTube.css
Source:
http://www.valacar.com/userstyles/
· Filed under Design·
Sometime after the launch of XP, somewhere in Redmond, someone on the Microsoft design team was in the progress of    developing something for Media Center. It was believed to be too powerful for public consumption and forever archived in    the servers at 1 Microsoft Way. Now 3 years later, a young hobbit man by the name of W3bbo saw light of this unheard    of   theme, and traveled far and wide to uncover its mysteries. One theme to find. One theme to upload. One theme to    rule them all.
Alright, enough Lord of the Rings talk for one day. Devoted Channel9 member W3bbo spotted an interesting theme on       one of the “people_ready†television commercials airing in the States. After some dedicated searching, he finally uncovered    this mystery XP theme by Microsoft. W3bbo writes,
During Royale’s development (the XP Media Center theme), the graphic artists also produced a black version of the skin, sans the overused “glass†effect. The result is an aesthetic black skin named “Royale Noirâ€, it even works with Office 2003.
Since the skin was never released (or reached final adjustments) there are a few issues with it: some of the colors don’t meet the overall “feel†(they’re too purple-ish compared to the greys of the bitmaps) and the inactive titlebars are a little too dark.
You’ll find it’s been signed by Microsoft and doesn’t require a custom UxTheme.dll in case there are any doubts as to its authenticity.
If you already have Royale installed, you’ll need to remove it as both of these skins share the same name.
This skin has not been released to anyone outside Microsoft, until now.
Screenshots
Download links:
http://www.gigasize.com/get.php/142770/royalenoir.rar
http://www.savefile.com/files/201988
http://rapidshare.com/files/1044522/royale_noir.rar.html
