Ars Grafik » WordPress Themes

Gods & Monsters Theme

admin — Fri, 05 Jun 2009 22:46:15 +0000

We’ve uploaded another theme today. This one, called Gods & Monsters, is stylized to the hilt, so business bloggers look elsewhere. Everyone else give it a gander.

Gods & Monsters is an image-rich, two column, grunge theme adorned with Medieval gods and monsters. There are lots of details, such as a stylized search box, interesting presentation of the date, and great illustrations like flying fish and fighting gods and monsters. The background of the content area is an old parchment, giving the whole theme a cool antiquated look. The colors are muted and dark, the text uniformly serif.

The navigation will display all published pages and will automatically accommodate two rows of tabs.

The sidebar is widget ready. At the top of the sidebar, you will find a custom RSS link and custom search field hard-coded into place. These could be removed, but they are designed to mesh with the rest of the theme’s design. Here is a screenshot:

As to browser compatibility, the site’s been tested in IE7, Firefox, Safari, Opera, and Chrome. It was not designed with IE6 in mind, so I included a special message to IE6 users kindly requesting that they upgrade their browser to Firefox. If you find a browser issue, please leave a comment.

To install the Gods and Monsters theme, you will need to:

Unzip the gods-and-monsters.zip folder
Upload the full folder gods-and-monsters to wp-content/themes
Go to your WordPress admin panel
Open the Appearance drop-down and select Themes
Select the Gods and Monsters theme and click Activate Gods and Monsters.

Hope you like it!

Free WordPress Theme: Paisley

admin — Thu, 07 May 2009 19:45:15 +0000

Today we’ve released another free WordPress theme: Paisley. I’m really excited about this one. I was experimenting with collages in Photoshop and Illustrator recently and got inspired–hence, the theme.

The Paisley theme features a colorful grunge header with homemade paisleys, patterns, and brushes. It’s a two-column theme, it’s clean, well-organized, and widget-ready. The body is dark, with ample space for posts and images (as you can see, the images look gorgeous on a dark background!). Tabbed navigation lets you add multiple pages.

Small details, like how the date and number of comments are displayed, make this theme really spectacular. It’s grunge, and it’s also simple and modern.

Paisley’s gone through the gamut of browser testing and passed with flying colors. Leave us a comment about the theme and your experience with it–we like hearing your thoughts!

We hope you like it as much as we do!

To install the Paisley theme, you will need to:

Unzip the paisley.1.1.zip folder
Upload the full folder paisley to wp-content/themes
Go to your WordPress admin panel
Open the appearance drop-down and select themes
Select the Paisley theme and click Activate Paisley

Free WordPress Theme: Slate

admin — Sun, 19 Apr 2009 21:08:07 +0000

Today we are rolling out a new, free WordPress theme called Slate…. no, it’s not a ripoff of the snarky news blog… think: dark stone grays and blacks with a shot of electric blue.

The theme features two gray columns on a slate gray background. In an effort to offset the potential monotone feel of a gray-on-gray page, we mixed in some electric blue highlights. The search box and text fields are in blue to add additional zing. Overall, we wanted it to be dark and sleek.

Page navigation is provided through tabs that sit above the main body section. Take a look at the picture to see how the layout works. Tabs will include a “Home” tab, additional page tabs, and an “RSS Feed” tab. If you would like other options, I will be putting out some tutorials in the coming weeks on how to tweak the theme’s navigation.

The sidebar is widget-ready for those who like widgets. For all of you who like to get your hands dirty and would prefer to code in all your sidebar bits, I kept the code simple and clean.

As to browser compatibility, the site’s been tested in IE6/7/8, Firefox, Safari, Opera, and Chrome. If you find an issue please leave a comment or send a message through the form at the bottom of this page.

To install the Slate theme, you will need to:

Unzip the slate.zip folder
Upload the full folder slate to wp-content/themes
Go to your WordPress admin panel
Open the appearance drop-down and select themes
Select the Slate theme and click Activate Slate.