As a result of three Digg homepage appearances over a period of a few weeks bringing my blog to it’s knees I decided to make a few changes. In addition to acquiring a new server and finding someone to optimize the heck out of it for me, I also decided to re-vamp my WordPress theme.
I’m probably a little pickier than most, but I was looking for the following list of features in the new theme:
- Speed – Along with the rapid growth of traffic on this blog I noticed a decline in page responsiveness. That is not something I want to subject hundreds of thousands of people to monthly. But most of the themes I came across suffer from “PHP bloat”, or the author’s feeling that more is always better.
- Accessibility – being one of the founders of HTMLHelp.com, it’s important to practice what I preach. So themes need to be accessible by any Web browser, on any operating system at any screen resolution – including screen readers for the visually impaired. This is currently very, very hard to find.
- Search Friendly – Although almost every theme claims to be “Search engine friendly”, I found that many could use quite a bit of improvement.
- Extensible – Webmasters have different tastes, so themes need to be flexible. Unfortunately the majority are poorly documented, use illogical naming schemes for CLASSes and IDs, and generally make it hard to modify them.
After having no luck finding an appropriate theme out of the hundreds that are publicly available I decided to just build it myself. The theme is currently in use here on One Man’s Blog, and I’m now making it available to anyone that would like to use it.
Rapid Access Menu
- General Overview
- Rapid Access Features
- Supported Plugins
- Download
- Installation Instructions
- Sample Sites and Additional Styles
- License
General
Rapid Access is a three-column, fluid width theme. This means that it resizes automatically to fit various resolution monitors. If you change the size of your browser window you can see how the theme fluidly adjusts. It will look best in resolutions over about 700 pixels wide (>99% of my visitors), but is usable even on smaller screens.
Rapid Access has been tested and works with WordPress 1.5.x – 2.3.x branches. If anyone has other versions and would like to test it I’d be happy to add your results.
Features
Fast
- Rapid Access was designed so that the left (content) column loads first. This means that scripts and plugins within the sidebars won’t slow down content rendering even if they are coming from another site which is typically slow (i.e. – MyBlogLog). Other templates which load the sidebar(s) first delay the entire page rendering until sidebar content is downloaded.
- All PHP files have been streamlined and unnecessary calls to the database have been eliminated. The faster a PHP page can be executed, the faster the Web page loads.
- Rapid Access avoids the often found (and dreaded) “themetoolkit.php” page which is known to tremendously increase the load on the server. Webmasters should be wary of themes which allow a high degree of customization within the control panel because these themes will not survive heavy traffic such as a DIGGing, or Slashdotting. (Trust me… I’ve proven this three times now.)
- The RA Stylesheet is under 10KB. Considering that the stylesheet is loaded for virtually every page load, this dramatically speeds up rendering compared to most theme’s 15-30kb.
Accessible
- Unlike fixed-width themes, the fluid width of Rapid Access accommodates more browser resolutions and makes better use of screen real estate at the same time. It is always better for readers, and Jakob Nielsen agrees with me in his Ten Most Violated Homepage Design Guidelines where number 2 states “Use a liquid layout that lets users adjust the homepage size”.
- The theme contains valid XHTML and CSS. This enables a wider range of Web browsers to access the site without issues.
- This theme includes a basic Aural Stylesheet. These enable people with Visual impairments easier access to the site.
- Sites running Rapid Access are (at least initially) Section 508 compliant and pass the Cynthia accessibility test. The ADA requires organizations to avoid discrimination on the basis of disability when providing services. (More info: ICDRI.org)
- This site (obviously running Rapid Access) achieved a “95″ in the SiteScore accessibility test the first and only time I checked it.
- Please note, although the framework for a Blog based on Rapid Access is accessible you must take care to ensure your individual blog entries and all of the plugins you use are also accessible. Here is the HTMLHelp.com guide on Accessibility to help out.
Search Friendly
If you’re interested in improving Search Engine rankings I wrote an article a while back on the topic which you may find helpful. I advise you to pay particular attention to the section on Content.
- Rapid Access’ left column, containing the main content of the blog, loads first putting the content for search engines to parse at the very beginning. This helps them to better index the site, which in turn results in more search engine traffic.
- You may notice that the Page title comes before the Blog name in the title bar. This seems to assist some search engines with relevance ranking, and makes reader bookmarking more meaningful.
- Accessibility is also an important factor with search engines, and of course we’ve already covered that.
Extensible
- The theme supports WordPress Widgets. My favorite site to find them is the Web Log Tools Collection. Please keep in mind that some Widets are not professionally created and may cause your site to stop validating.
- Each page of PHP and CSS within Rapid Access contains notes regarding various functions.
- Whenever possible I used logical naming for styles and functions to make it easier to find and make changes.
- Logical “human readable” classes were used for style sheet definitions.
- Stylesheet definitions are ordered logically as they appear from top of the page to bottom.
Attention to Detail
- I believe this is the only theme for WordPress which does not include an active link to the homepage, on the homepage; another of Jakob Nielsen’s Ten Most Violated Homepage Design Guidelines.
- Unlike most WordPress themes which make a mess of printing, Rapid Access includes a Print Stylesheet that renders printouts that closely resemble the screen version.
- The stylesheet includes definitions for manual insertion of text or image asides, as well as left or right floating pullquotes.
- Style has been included for right or left Pullquotes. See a real example here.
- Style has been included for right or left floating ad units. You can use either text or image ads and they will have a border around them. See a real example here.
- I spent a great deal of time trimming down the code. This includes removing unnecessary spaces, punctuation, tabs, line breaks, etc. All of this work amounts to only a few KBs saved per page, but when you add them all up it amounts to a signifigant savings in bandwidth and time. Especially for high traffic blogs, or users on slow connections.
Rapid Access currently includes built-in support for the following plugins:
In the case of built in plugin support, I always use the “function_exists()” check to first checks if the plugin is installed. If the end user does not wish to use the plugin it should not break page rendering.
- WordPress Widgets – A must have!
- WP Admin Bar Reloaded – Displays a handy admin menu at the top of the page for logged in users.
- Recent Comments Widget – Shows recent comments in the sidebar.
- Ultimate Tag Warrior – Shows related tags below each post.
- Other Posts from Cat – Shows related articles below each post.
- Comment Quicktags – Inserts a quicktag toolbar on the blog comment form.
- Live Comment Preview – Gives users with a live comment preview.
- Paged Threaded Comments – Allows users to respond directly to comments and breaks comments into multiple pages for blogs will lots of comment activity.
Got a plugin you’d like to see supported that won’t mess up the theme? Use the contact form to send a suggestion.
Download Rapid Access
Version History
- July 7, 2007 v.13 – Changes to Style Sheets which fix IE6 rendering issue with blockquotes and add new styles for footer column support. Changes to Footer.php to allow 3 footer columns to be inserted. I recommend all users at least update stylesheet.css and print.css
- May 7, 2007 v.12 – Changes to index.php and single.php to fix a date stamp bug. (Thanks to Roy Kaldung!)
- May 1, 2007 v.11 – Minimal changes to header.php to better handle IE7 RSS requests.
- Initial Release v.1
Installation Instructions
- Download, unzip and upload the Rapid Access Theme to your “/wp-content/themes/” directory.
- Download and install any of your desired plugins.
- In the WordPress Admin area, activate the Rapid Access theme under the Presentation menu.
- Configure your desired Widgets in the Presentation | Sidebar Widgets menu.
- Enjoy your fast, accessible new theme!
Optional:
- Upload your own “Favicon.jpg” to the Rapid Access theme folder to customize your site’s bookmark icon. (Here are a few ideas.)
- In the “header.php” file update the content in the following lines with info related to your site:
<meta name=”Author” content=”" />
<meta name=”Description” content=”" />
<meta name=”Keywords” content=”" />
Sample Sites and Themes
Sites Using the Rapid Access Theme
If you have a site running Rapid Access and would like to submit it for inclusion please drop a comment below or use the contact form.
Additional Stylesheets for Rapid Access
If you develop an alternative style for Rapid Access please let me know and, if it’s good enough, I’ll list it here.
I’d love to see hundreds of different CSS based designs for this theme. Also, if you have suggestions for changes to the underlying PHP (including necessary classes or ids) please work with me on those so that I can update the theme for everyone’s benefit.
- Your stylesheet listed here!
License
The Rapid Access theme is distributed under my new Nice Person License as Postcardware. Please use it, modify it, build commercial Web sites around it, and make the Web a faster, more accessible place. Here is what you could do for me in return:
- If you could either leave the attribution link in the footer in place or link back to any article on One Man’s Blog I sure would appreciate it!
- If you discover ways to improve the speed, accessibility or features of this theme, please let me know.
- Do you have some experience with HTML, CSS, PHP, etc.? Please join our community at HTMLHelp.com and share your knowledge with those in need.
- If not, do something nice for someone you don’t know today.
- Finally, if you really like it, drop me an old fashioned post card in the mail! That would be completely awesome! You can send them to:
John Pozadzides
PO Box 2591
Frisco, TX 75034
USAIf I get enough of them I’ll put together a post with the really interesting ones.
As always, comments and suggestions are encouraged. My future development and support of this theme will be directly proportional to the amount of enthusiasm it appears to garner from the community.
Enjoy!
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Chuck,
That is awesome. I’m glad you like it! Now, let me give you a couple of tips about things I’ve found most effective when using this theme:
First, my WP Admin Bar Reloaded plugin will make your life so much better. Give it a try. Trust me!
Next, I’m guessing the ads you’ve currently got on the site are somewhat ineffective. I recommend you remove all of those and try something completely different!
Let me know if you need any help or run into any problems with the use of the theme.
John
The Ads do work, I’m making money on them…. :) I dumped Blog Ads last night… They changed thier code and it don’t like Wordpress! :mad: :cry:
If I could change anything on the theme it would be this. A rounded quote Bubble on quoted text would be nice. and Maybe the colors. I’d like a Little more Blue in my Blog. As it is my favorite color.
Also, the Ability to have a picture on the top left would be nice too. :)
I’m still kinda working importing everything over from blogger.
Drop me an e-mail sometime… tpblogeditor@gmail.com
-Chuck
I do recommend for your read this program for writing to thier Wordpress Blogs from remote.
They just released Beta 3, and it’s awesome…
-Chuck
John, thanks for sharing your theme. I’ve downloaded it for study, when I get some more time.
I’m a big fan of 3-column themes, because (a) I don’t like wasted screen real estate, and (b) I’ve discovered that a wider main column is harder to read. (I tried that on my son’s blog, and he complained!)
I had documented my last experiences on installing and customizing Wordpress on your own domain, where I settled on the Relaxation 3-column theme as a reasonable choice for friends. It’s widget friendly and comes with a lot of different photo and colour alternatives. (I’m not good at picking colours, and defer to real artists!)
For myself, though, on my personal photoblog and professional blog, I modified the Radical Congruency 2005 theme. It’s working fine, except that when I moved the main column from the centre to the left, it occasionally causes issues with submarining of middle (i.e. left sidebar) column. After many hours of staring at the CSS, I’ve left the bug in, to be fixed at a later date. (I should also upgrade to widgets, then, too).
Here’s my question, stripping away most of the CSS content: how did you originally set up the basic 3-column structure when you built up the theme? Did you use use something like Piefecta? Or did you just write from scratch?
I’m not a CSS newbie, but clearly, I’m in over my head. Thanks.
David,
First of all, I enjoyed your blogs. They look nice, and I know they represent a LOT of work and effort. Thanks for sharing all of your experiences.
On to your question, I am pretty old fashioned… I just coded this theme from scratch. I built it to suit my own needs and desires, and although I know it’s not much to look at, I was much more interested in speed and accessibility than appearances.
The way I look at it, my content provides plenty of pictures and other things like that to spice up the pages, so I’m more interested in having a nice framework to showcase my posts than something that competes with them.
Having said that, I am 100% sure that my CSS could be reworked to generate a much more attractive site by a real designer, and it has been my hope that a few would do that so we could end up with some different choices from a visual perspective, while still retaining the PHP discipline of this underlying framework.
My theme was designed from the start with the main content area on the left, and I did see random instances where the sidebar would push to the bottom of the page. The answer in my case was to add
overflow:hidden;to the sidebar CSS.Anyway, feel free to mess with this theme as much as you want, and if you have questions just ask and I’ll offer whatever assistance I can.
Take care,
John
Hi John,
have you tested the theme with Wordpress 2.3?
Cesar,
Yes, I’ve got it running on 3 different blogs successfully with 2.3 so far, so it should be just fine. I’ll also update the post to reflect that.
Take care,
John
Hey John,
I’ve also got it on two blogs with WP 2.3 –
Hippie Spelunker – “H2″
and
Lisa Marie Mary
I’m just getting going with these blogs, I know I have a lot of work to do, I haven’t even finished implementing all of your recommendations yet.
But I am really enjoying this theme and more importantly, all of your great advice that goes along with it! :D Thank you very much!
Hi!
I was wondering if it were possible to add buttons next to the about button, like feed, home, etc.
thanks!
Seems like a great site, and i intend to use it as a new theme for my site at http://gadgetsandsuch.com. tested you site at testiphone.com, but found that it generated a secondary scroll bar. This something I’m trying to eleminate from any theme that I use.
Have you tested this theme or any mobile device to see if it is rendered without generating an horizontal scrollbar?
Planner,
The only time I’ve seen a secondary scroll bar is when someone puts something in the sidebar that is wider than the 200px limit. In those cases the simple fix is to adjust the width of the containers within the sidebar. If you are seeing it under different conditions please send over a link and I’ll take a look at it and see if it can be fixed.
I access my site on my Windows based cell phone routinely. It works in single column mode, condensed mode, and full “desktop” mode with horizontal scroll bars. So again, if you’re having problems just send me over the link and we’ll see if we can’t get you fixed up.
Take care,
John
hii!..
Thank you very much for this project..
Your work allows other people to create masterpieces in NetSpace
Many thanks!
One awesome theme right out of the box. Great functionality. Really solid. I uploaded it to my website and instantly thought “bingo”, this was right along the lines of what I was searching for.
I haven’t yet fiddled with the styles or colours yet, I’ve been to impressed with this theme after so many disappointing ones floating around the internet.
Out of curiosity… you mentioned you were going to have alternative stylesheets uploaded here, I couldn’t spot any floating around, did I miss them somewhere?
Thanks for having posted this awesome theme.
Love the theme! I’ve got it on Life on the Road and my other site Adventures in Trucking. Life on the Road I changed the most, Adventures only the top banner is changed. Adventures is my “test” site for Life on the Road.
My question is – Do you use anything to update the footer or is it done by hand? I ask because the Popularity plug in doesn’t seem to update because of the Super Cache, but I still like to highlight popular posts.
Three of the sites you have listed as using your theme, aren’t using your theme anymore.
Love your wpadmin plug in too!
Patmanpato,
You know, I don’t have any additional stylesheets uploaded yet! I need to get on that. I am planning on having a contest with real cash prizes to incent people to create stylesheets for this theme, but I have made a few minor changes to my version of it that have not yet been updated.
I’ll try to get my changes uploaded to the site sometime in the next week or so and launch a contest after that. Nothing would make me happier than to see some really nice skin wrapped around the theme. :-)
John
Wayne,
Thanks for the pointer about those other sites… I’ve removed them and added yours instead. And I must say – yours look fantastic! Much better than mine! :-) Oh, and your podcasts kick ass too! I really like the way you’ve got the music fading in there.
John
Oh, and I almost forgot… I update the footer area manually, but you can use plugins in there just as easily.
If you are using Super Cache it will update, just less often. However often you have it set to refresh the cache in the back end is how often the footer will update. Of course, for visitors that leave comments or who are logged into your site they will bypass the supercache altogether.
Hope that helps!
John
Your sites look great Wayne.
I’m going to try to fiddle with the CSS when I get home this weekend for some fun. But honestly, the layout and functionality of this theme has impressed me enough to have not bothered fiddling yet! :D
Thanks. I’ve been through several themes. I even paid for a custom on my other trucking blog (that’s redirected to Life…). but he did more of what he wanted and if I wanted something different, it was a big deal. I like simple and functional in most things.
I’ve moved to the “more stuff above the fold” line of thought and this works great. My wife wanted our picture back on the site, so I had to learn how to do that. And I changed the colors on my other site and put back the banner they had before back up there.
My Adventures site was featured in Wall St. Journal Online and got hammered. So if it happens again, I’ll be ready!
John’s been great for answering questions, between him and htmlhelp.com, I’m really learning a lot about this stuff.
Hi there,
The CSS for this theme has been quite a pleasure to work with. Most other themes CSS is mangled up beyond repair, but in this theme everything has been right where I’d expected it. Quality!
I’ve just begun fiddling with the CSS for my own site, but one thing I’m having difficulty locating, is how to remove the border around the entire page. Ie. the border outside the gray border that you see on your blog. Removing the gray border was a piece of cake, but what I want is basically to have the header and footer extend right to the end of the page, both top and bottom, and left to right.
Thanks heaps for any help!
Ps… Not sure if my modifications will look even 1/2 as great as the original, but it’s fun to experiment!
Patmanpato,
If I’m understanding exactly what you are talking about – and I’m assuming you are talking about the fact that outside of the greyish border around the whole page is a small white border, I believe that is caused by the fact that the background for then entire blog is set to white. This is set in the following CSS:
body {background:#fff; font-family:'Arial', 'Verdana'; color:#40454b; font-size:.8em; border:solid 8px #CCCCCC}Now, if you change the “#fff” to another color I believe you’ll see that white border disappear, but it might also make the background of the entire page change too. So play with it and let me know if that was what you were looking for or not.
Take care,
John
that line of code seems to affect the colour of the background (which affects the colour of that white border) , and the last part affects the grey border. So I can change the colour of this white border, but the problem is I’m trying to eliminate it altogether. It seems like it’s some kind of padding around everything, but I cant figure out where it is.
My aim is to have the header flush with the top and sides and no border around it, similarly have the footer flush with the bottom etc.
A quick look at my page might make things clearer. My css file is here if it helps.
Thanks heaps. :)
Hey I got your theme crankin on my site now at UnfitMan
I did a few minor modifications to make it even more minimal (I think). It’s probably not to most peoples tastes I guess (not sure if its worth making an example of :P ).
It’s the first time I’ve ever really started a blog. I was getting too hung up with fiddling with the layout and all that, so for now I guess I’ll just focus on putting some content up and iron out the tid-bits later on.
So for me, your theme has been a blessing. Thanks Mate! All the way from the down under ;)
cheers,
Patmanpato
I’m wondering if I could please get your input on something. Out of the clear blue sky I started having serious CPU overload problems, with the result that my weblog would disappear for minutes at a time. I hadn’t made any big changes or added any plugins, but I did everything I could think of: I talked to my hosting provider (hostican) who suggested that I block bots that might be bombarding the site, which I then did. No change. I followed all the suggestions I could find on the forums and in various wp blogs, turned off plugins, made sure supercache was working, reduced the number of posts on the front page, and I changed themes. First to something else, and then as soon as I found your rapid access, I switched to that. In the midst of making simple template changes (taking out comments so I’d have three columns in the footer, for example) I got locked out again.
Once I got back in, I checked the bottom of the page and here’s what it told me: generated with 23 queries, in 1.333 seconds. Comparing that to the bottom of this weblog (85 queries, 0.435 seconds) I’m wondering what the heck could be going on. My hosting provider isn’t open to the idea that it might be a server configuration problem, but these numbers seem to indicate that might be the case. But then this isn’t my strong suite, so I thought you might be able to give me some ideas.
Thanks for whatever help you provide.
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