teddY-risatioN™

teddY-risatioN™ Delta is finally ready for release after 3 days of hard work I’m terribly sorry that I didn’t provide a sneak peek for you all - blame it on my perfectionist mindset, it instructed me to show you the complete version of this theme instead of letting you see it partially uncompleted and riddled with bugs. teddY-risatioN™ Delta is actually heavily modified from the Wordpress Sandbox Theme, and the idea of making it struck me when I designed my new blog favicon (thanks Id for the inspiration, do you know that one favicon of yours motivated me to create a whole new Wordpress theme? You’re really awesome!) And then when I was searching for easily editable, perfectly minimalistic theme, I stumbled upon Plaintxt.org and that is where the sandbox theme is available. Here’s a screenshot of it:

And now here comes a list of features in this new theme!

Features

• Scriptaculous-powered sidebar - now you can expand and collapse all the elements in the sidebar (some of them are already expanded). Just click on the headers to toggle the expand and collapse effect.
• New header - I’ve learned some neat Photoshopping tricks from Webdesigner Wall to give my header a makeover. Some obvious effects are the glowing background and particle trail effect.
• Icon navigation - I got this idea from Adobe’s Wheel-O’-Icons, where the icons are arranged around a colour wheel. So I’ve made my own colour wheel and used desired colours from the wheel to create the icons:

• Description of icons - when you hover your mouse over the icons in the navigation bar, a short description of what does it lead you to appears at the bottom. This is a javascript effect adapted from the lovely Dolphin tabs.
• Huge footer - the old classic footer is inherited from the previous theme, equipped with a huge tag cloud and other SEO junkies (but there’s a twitter feed down there too!)
• Cross-browser compatibility - this theme has been tested to work at IE6.0 and above, Firefox 1.0 and above and Safari 2.0 and above. I didn’t test it for Opera because I didn’t get it installed. Anyway less than 1% of my visitors use Opera.

Bugs

There are certain bugs in this theme, although they’re quite insignificant, it’s better to keep you posted.

• Header breaks when viewed at resolution of width: 930px and below - this is because I’ve displayed the image at the [body] element and thus when the width of the window is smaller than the container, the header breaks. So this theme is not 800*600 compatible, but is okay from 1024*768 and onwards.
• In Firefox, when the tagboard (nested in an [iframe] element) is expanded and collapsed, a minor visual bug will appear.
• Minor padding and margin discrepancies among different browsers on different operating systems.
• If you find any more bugs, report them!

Special thanks

I didn’t do this theme alone - I got help and inspiration from many helpful and wonderful people. In no specific order:

• Andy Skelton & Scott Allan Wallick (Plaintxt.org) - for released the wonderful Sandbox theme - without it this theme is barely possible.
• Id - for your amazing favicon! The header navigation system in your blog layout got me inspired as well! Thanks for your support!
• Ivy - for your minimalistic Springley theme! I used your layout for referrence, especially for the links page!
• Iva - thanks for your mail! I feel really honoured to receive it, and thanks for all the compliments that got me going!
• Nick La - for your inspirational designs and layout at N.Design Studio and Webdesigner Wall!
• Melle, Yappy, Id, Bush, Han & momo - for leaving supportive and encouraging comments that kept me going (and prevented me from falling asleep at 2am in the morning)
• Bush for being very kind and generous for writing a flattering review of my new theme. Thanks Bush!
• Shiqi for your complimetns at the tagboard! <3
• Yueqi for the refreshing tag!

That’s all for this post! I hope you guys like it!