I’m proud to announce the release of teddY-risatioN™ Zeta! No, it’s not named after Catherine Zeta-Jones, but rather because it’s the sixth Wordpress theme in the Greek series. It all started with Alpha, and now, I have moved on with four other themes before designing this new one.
You might be wondering why this theme is released so quickly after the previous one, teddY-risatioN™ Epsilon. The reason is simple - the minimalist design doesn’t suit my personal taste well. However, I didn’t regret designing Epsilon although it took me just two more days to pull out a new one - Zeta has inherited the general typography from Epsilon, and some ideas I had in mind originally for Epsilon is now implemented in Zeta. I shall walk you through a few important features for this new theme!
Über-useful Wordpress conditional tags
I didn’t implement any conditional tags that comes with the Wordpress installation because I thought I wouldn’t need them at all except for my header navigation menu. I was wrong when I started realising that conditional tags give Wordpress designers and bloggers a huge range of flexibility - you can literally dictate which content to appear on a certain page with simple, down-to-earth PHP expressions.
Although the Wordpress Codex gives you an all-encompassing list of the conditional tags available in your Wordpress installation, I think what it lacks is examples - people who are new to PHP, like me, need to understand the syntax behind PHP. All the question marks, backlashes, hashes and etc appears to be extremely daunting to new comers. So I did some search with Google and stumbled upon this interesting article by Theme Lab - The Ultimate Guide to Wordpress Conditional Tags. The author justified the use of the word ‘ultimate’ by displaying a couple of important ways of playing around with the conditional tags - and that’s where I’ve learnt how to use the tags to my personal liking.
Conditional tags in this theme helped me to customise the sidebar content for different pages - you’ll see how it’s content differs from page to page. Not to forget the three bulky boxes that appear above the blog entires at the homepage! I didn’t want them to follow you everywhere as you browse around the blog (that will be irritating!), so I’ve made them to appear on the front page only.
Cross Browser Compatibility
This theme is designed to appear readable and almost visually identical on Mozilla Firefox 2, Safari 3 and Internet Explorer 7. With these three browsers installed on my laptop, I’ve worked my way through the design simultaneously with all three of them to ensure that nothing is out of place 
it does make my laptop lag though! Imagine having a measly 512mb RAM while running Photoshop, Firefox, Safari, IE, iTunes (I couldn’t design without some music!) and an FTP programme - a perfect cocktail for a crash into oblivion. But luckily besides a few system crashes (and I’ve saved my work regularly so nothing much is lost), everything went fine.
If you’re an IE6 user, you’ll most probably find this blog unreadable to a certain extent. This blog uses the alpha transparency feature in images of .PNG extensions, and versions of IE 6 and below does not render transparency properly. Instead of settling for GIFs, I’ve went ahead with PNGs but armed my blog with a simply IE5.5 and IE6 fix for transparency issues. TwinHelix gives you an ingenious fix for the transparency problem - so I’m quite confident that this is fixed for my IE6 visitors, but for the bugs in CSS interpretation, you’ll have to wait because my house desktop (which has IE6 installed) burnt a hole in the graphic card a few days back.
New Favicon!
As I ditch the previous blog logo, I designed a new one for this theme and so I’m making it my new favicon as well. It is an asterisk with 6 different-coloured petals, the remnant of the rainbow-coloured teddY-risatioN™ Delta 
at least it brings some life into the dull blue colour scheme!
Problems? Help? Extra information?
If you have problems with the new theme (except for IE6 users, I’ll fix the IE6 bugs soon!), need help on CSS and Wordpress design or extra information on how I’ve made this theme possible, feel free to contact me!
11 responses to teddY-risatioN™ Zeta Released!
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June 13th, 2008 at 1:01 am
Teddy, I love this theme! Hands down! Seriously! This is one of my favourite themes from you yet!
And I love the tag line on the header.. it fits you quite aptly. Great job!
Check out Id’s last blog post: Id, On Pause.
June 13th, 2008 at 11:51 am
yup. i’d love this theme much much more. it looks minimalistic, but the soft touches of gradient-ed background and sidebar looks awesome. i can see there was a lot of effort in thinking up how to make it artistically tasteful, but yet minimalistic. very pleasing to eye too. it’s nice to see that to fit the theme, the sidebar, footer, header went minimalistic too.
but if i got my definition of minimalistic wrong, then this would still be a great compromise between minimalistic and a bit of design.
i don’t think the page loads on much right? which is also a great thing.
big big thumbs up from me.
Check out jason’s last blog post: After the Competition
June 13th, 2008 at 6:12 pm
June 14th, 2008 at 1:37 am
This looks fantastic, Teddy, although how you work your magic on this stuff is still totally mind boggling to me
Check out thecoffeesnob’s last blog post: Boston Part II: The Attractions And All Things Touristy
June 14th, 2008 at 2:03 am
Hey Teddy
I love your new wordpress theme. I like how it is easy to read, clear navigation and I like the colors you used. The small simple logo you used makes your theme look very sophisticated. Overall I am impressed. Great job teddY 
Have a great weekend!!!
June 14th, 2008 at 5:37 am
Superb! Cant say much. I heading south now. See yah
Check out NoktahHitam’s last blog post: If Only I Could Turn Back Time
June 14th, 2008 at 10:21 am
I love this new theme better than the previous one. it looks greatm teddy! neat, as always. I especially love the way you put together the contents on the header. and i see that they are not here on entry page. good.
all in all, it’s an awesome theme. (is there any word to describe something that’s better than awesome? I cant think of any right now. lol)
Check out Aisyah’s last blog post: Why did I stop going there?
June 14th, 2008 at 11:52 am
@Id
heheh. I think it’s one of my favourite as well because I can finally make good use of alpha transparency in PNG for my theme. In the past I dared not even have the idea of doing so out of fear that IE6 visitors will see a broken page. But after stumbling upon a lightweight behavoir fix for IE5.5 and IE6, alpha transparency is no longer holding me back.
Thank you
As for the tagline, I initially wanted it to just me, ‘Minimalist design, less is better’. But I realise by using ‘maximalist’ in the tagline will create this interesting irony in it
@jason
Actually I’m not very sure myself about whether this theme can be counted as minimalistic too! But I guess with less glaring visual elements and having soft transitions of colour throughout the page makes this theme more minimalistic than my previous ones.
Initially I wanted to frame the sidebar because I thought that having a sidebar that blends seamlessly into the background will make it lose structure and visual attention from readers. But after looking at a handful of professional design layouts, frameless sidebar will definitely be the best way to go for a minimalist design.
In fact this theme comes with a whooping 182kb of graphic! But for the front page, less than two-thirds of the graphic is loaded, which is around 100kb (which is quite managable). Althought it’s two times heavier than the truly minimalistic teddY-risatioN Epsilon, it’s still small as compared to the 320+kb monster of teddY-risatioN Delta!
@abdusfauzi
Thank you! Actually what made the theme look seamless is because only the content is segragated from the background. For the header, sidebar and footer, they blend smoothly into the blue background, thus creating less contrast and a smoother feeling.
@thecoffeesnob
Thanks! Actually what I really needed is a basic Wordpress theme to work on. Being a complete PHP idiot, I could not build a Wordpress theme fron ground up, and thus have to find a ’sandbox’ theme to work on. I’ve settled for the Sandbox Theme from Plaintxt.org because of it’s rich semantic markup and almost no styling.
What I really did was just using simple Photoshop skills to create gradiented backgrounds, and work my way up using CSS styling.
@Yunia
for the colour scheme, I stuck to my favourite blue. The logo is actually an asterisk, but I’ve modified it a little to make it look more like a logo rather than plain text, heheh. May you have an amazing weekend too!
Hey there, welcome back from your long hiatus! I’m glad to see you back in action
p/s: I hope you get your pool renovation is going well! When it’s done, have a splashing good time in the warm summer!
@NoktahHitam
Thanks! Have a safe trip… and good luck for your blog’s redesign!
@Aisyah
I think this theme is better too! I’ve avoided making the header too big in other pages because it’ll discourage visitors from browsing, since huge headers can be potentially irritating.
June 16th, 2008 at 6:01 pm
NICE theme! i like the smoothness, the shape, the color. good design altogether!
Check out AdrianC’s last blog post: i think im in love…
June 16th, 2008 at 6:50 pm
Thanks Adrian! Lol you’re so kind… see you at Plurk later
June 19th, 2008 at 2:30 pm
AMAZING THEME!
I want an open source copy!~ =D =D
Check out ingSiang’s last blog post: 16.06.08 - Let’s Go Hiking