Wordpress tips, tricks and tools

Hidden Beauty

Hidden Beauty is a two-column Wordpress theme that does its job without being too fancy. Apart from the artsy header and its flowing graphics, the entire blog is stripped down in its design and will appeal to basic bloggers and, well, people who love green.

But is the beauty of this theme hidden, or does it even exist? Here’s what we think.

Pros

If we were to be asked, the theme is beautiful in itself. And the key to that is its straightforward design. When you look at it, it’s just composed of two columns – one for the content and the other for the sidebar. In such a set up, you immediately find what it is you’re looking for. That is so much unlike other designs which put the content in the middle of the layout while the navigation links are buried under it.

It’s also great that it’s Google Adsense ready. The colors already blend with the theme’s overall design and the thing that’s left to do for bloggers is to change the publisher id in the theme’s code.

Cons

There are some flaws on this theme, however. Let’s begin with the choice of a tower ad on the sidebar. It somehow pushes down other useful navigation links downwards like the categories, archives and the login and RSS feed links. Of course you can edit the size, but it would have been good if the choice of the ad helped in making the design functional.

Meanwhile, people who use reading glasses might need to have it handy when visiting a blog with this theme. While the choice of font type is good as it is legible, the size makes the entire content unreadable, at least for those with eye problems. A solution to this, as always, is by giving people options by which they can change the font size of the content.

Check out the live demo of this theme and here’s the download link for the theme.

Future Tech

Future Tech is a Wordpress theme designed by the folks at Web Hosting Geeks. At first glance, it combines the elements of Web 2.0 design (the use of light colors and rounded corners) with its predecessor. While the concept looks good on paper, the design is rather awkward. But let’s not get ahead of ourselves here.

So let’s move on to reviewing the entire design by weighing in the good things and the elements where it can improve further.

Pros

The design is pretty straightforward and it’s a good thing. There’s a lot of space devoted to the content which is the point of putting up a blog in the first place. Some designers tend to forget this and Future Tech sets a good example on this aspect.

Also, the header isn’t too big unlike most themes today. Because of that, people no longer need to scroll down several lines just to get to the content box and the sidebar.

Cons

We’ve mentioned something about the design a while ago and so we’ll discuss it further here. Again, there’s an awkward marriage between Web 2.0 and early web design.

First on the header, there’s the image of the globe, an IC and a portion of a keyboard. We’ve seen it in numerous designs in the past and right now, the same kind of design looks dated, if not, tacky.

Then there’s the Web 2.0-ish search box. Yes it looks cool, but it somehow sticks out too much from the overall design. It now looks as if the search box is the main element of the blog, rather than the content.

Finally, the choice of the tower on the ad space on the sidebar somehow destroys the overall design. By choosing such an ad size, a lot of the elements on the sidebar get pushed down the bottom like the archives, the blog roll and the meta links.

A live demo of this theme is available and you can download the theme here.