About This Site's Theme

The theme for this site is a heavily modified version of a theme called "pushbutton", which can be found here drupal.org/project/Themes.

I chose that theme to modify because it was one of the first themes I found that worked well in Firefox, Safari, IE6 and IE7. There are of course others, for example, "aberdeen", which also works very well in each browser.

My goal in converting the pushbutton theme was simplify, simplify, simplify. I wanted to create a bare bones starting point from which to build other themes. Simplification of a theme has it's easy tasks, such as removing the background imiages and changing the font, and it's complex ones, such as spacing, layout and text sizing. Basically it was a fun effort in tweak and view, tweak and view until I had something I could live with. Adding the primary link tabs and honing in on the feel were the probably the trickiest aspects of the effort.

I originally wanted to use the Zen theme, which is designed to be a well commented starting point, but it simply didn't work in IE7. I played with it a bit, but quickly went back to my pushbutton modification effort.

The only (minor) thing I didn't like about the pushbutton theme was the use of tables. Tables are used to block the main sections of the site, and work just fine, but an all div implementation is more flexible. It didn't bother me enough to apply the energy to remove them.

All in all, I'm happy with the clean look and feel. I had simple, clean, business content in mind when building it. I want this theme to pursuade the viewer's attention to explore the content while not getting distracted by the site itself.

A note about the globe image. I purchased a web template ($50+) with the image included. The template absolutely fell apart in IE7. I wasn't really crazy about the template to begin with. In the spirit of making lemonade when [a web template] gives you lemons, I scrapped everything but the images and started from scratch. Like many other people, I looked toward CSS Zen Garden for inspiration of the main site. I like simplicity on the web and hope I have achieved it here.