Eventually I plan on creating a very unique custom theme for Josh.net, but until that point in time I have decided to stick with the default theme that ships with WordPress for reasons I outline below.
I spent a lot of time looking through the gazillions of templates available through WordPress and had a very hard time finding one that I could respect for both its creativity and for being technically sound. Let’s face it, picking a theme for your blog is a very, very big decision. You want it to look nice, but you also need it to perform well behind the scenes (at least if you are hoping for search engine traffic). One might have great style, but when you analyze its compatibility with plugins or valid CSS it would fail. Just as you could find a template with great CSS and XHTML, but it would look like crap. So at the end of the day I decided that ‘default’ is super clean, nicely organized, easy to read AND it has valid XHTML, CSS, compatibility with many plugins and not to mention very SEO friendly. Also, since so many people use the template there is great advice in forums on how to customize and work with the template.
After I decided to stick with ‘default’ I wanted to understand more about who created it, and here is what I came up with…
Today WordPress ships with a standard template named ‘default’, but that was not always its name. When Michael Heilemann developed the theme he named it ‘Kubrick’ after his favorite director, Stanley Kubrick. On first brush I wondered what one had to do with the other, and then it hit me. When you come across a ‘Kubrick’ WP theme site you instantly know what the theme is, what platform the site runs on etc., in the same way that you would recognize a ‘Kubrick’ film at first glance. According to Mr. Heilemann’s website, ‘Kubrick’ was born in the summer of 2004.
In the coming months WordPress will be releasing WordPress Version 3.0. It will be very intersting to see what changes they make to the template.