I have a blog of my own. You can find out who is “me” and what is this blog about here and there.

And right now - couple of words about what it costed to me. Four days: two on design, two on customizing Wordpress. What was the idea? Well,  to start with - I wanted a standalone blog. If you pretend to be an IT blogger but are unable to build it with your own hands - are you really an IT man? Or ex-one who didn’t write a line of code for last …teen years?!

Secondly, these Wordpress themes - they are awfull. OK you may say they are “nice” and I’d agree to this but I couldn’t find a single one matching the following requirements:

• cross-browserness (behave well in IE6 in particular)
• fluid layout
• variable fonts

Sacrifying usability for pretty design is not for me.

» read the rest

Does it hurt your eyes? Sorry - this is what I call “genuine design” What about usability - navigation? Typography? Search?

It may seem that Wordpress has more than enough  themes ready to use. But when you come closer -

1. standard/default themes are awfull
2. most of them are not internationalized or internationalization is broken
3. the vast majority use fixed width layout and fixed fonts - I hate this style
4. only few works smoothly in IE6 which still is the most widely browser used I guess

So I had to do it myself. YUI CSS helped a lot. It gives you

• a relaible base (all browsers are brought to unified visual style)
• reasonable typography (fonts and spaces)
• grid framework (top-level web page layout markup)

It’s really very helpfull. CSS is a kind of black magic which can burn your brains. With YUI you just add your specific styles to well-established basement - fast and easy.

I also considered the Blueprint CSS which is promoted by Google but YUI has better concept, supports flexible layout  and is far more mature.