davemcnally.net

You get a request through your website about doing some design work. The job seems right up your street and the money is good so you decide to take it on. Great, you then have whatever form of communication is possible with the client to establish the brief and determine what they had in mind and what direction to go in with the design. But hold on, what happens when there is no brief? How do you pull of that pleasing design when you don’t know who it’s going to be used by and what they do?

I’m talking about designing a free template. In this specific case, a Wordpress theme. You may know I’m in the process of creating my first free theme and I’ve scrapped several designs thus far. Want to know why? Do continue reading then…

I started out thinking I could just mock-up some generic theme that would suit the target audience. I quickly learnt that not only did I not know what a generic theme should include but I had absolutely no idea who my target audience actually was. So I started looking to other places offering free themes and to see who they catered for. In the majority of cases, the themes were far generic for my liking and all looked too similar. The other offerings out there that actually targeted a specific audience did so by creating several themes aimed at different interests so the majority of people had something to choose from that would suit their needs.

Creating several themes to being with isn’t really an option for me at the moment so I decided that designing a theme that catered for more than one demographic would be the best thing to do. That way, I would get maximum exposure and maximum benefit for the work put in. This led me to realize one thing about my target audience and that is the fact that I don’t actually have one. I’m not trying to please a certain client or meet specific requirements with this design, it’s up to the people looking at it to decide if they want to use it or not. Expectations don’t matter in this case and I have complete control over the outcome of the design.

I then started drafting out some different approaches to how I could design this niche-less theme. I don’t want to put something out there that’s just the same as what everyone else is doing but there are some many free themes going about that it’s really difficult to think of certain elements on a page and have them gel together in a way that no one else has done before whilst keeping a certain degree of normality to the look of it. I can’t go too crazy with design as people expect to see certain things in certain places and I’m not sure if disrupting that is a good thing or not. There need to be basic elements included that users will need and they need to be adaptable and open to changes depending on each person’s needs and requirements.

A space for a title/logo needs to be included, a navigation, a sidebar of some sort, a search box and, of course, space for the articles themselves. Then there’s the expected footer and a few other things people expect to see when looking at a blog. Once you have these elements mapped out, you quickly realize there’s not a whole lot more you can put in. After all, it’s not a custom design and needs to remain completely neutral in terms of the look and feel of the overall theme. It then becomes apparent that the only way to separate yourself from the others is in the approach these specific elements and the way you place them on the page. They all must be included but they don’t always have to be exactly as expected and it’s this unique way of arranging the elements to interact in a different way that is helping me out when trying to come up with something that slightly new and different.

The point is, if you’re designing a free theme or even a premium one that many people will purchase and adapt to their own needs, you don’t need to be just another sheep in the flock. Don’t be afraid to try something completely different. If people don’t like it, they don’t have to download it but if people do like it, you’ve got something completely unique to the rest and that’s going to make your design stand out in the crowd.

I hope this isn’t setting any expectations for the theme I’m working on. I don’t people being disappointed when it comes out expecting something revolutionary! I can’t promise it’s going to change the way you look at designs or even that you’ll like it but the thing is, it doesn’t really matter. If you like it, great. If not, don’t download it and I’ll try to please the rest of you next time.