Rahman reflects on Blogger designs, thoughts from Jason Fried of 37signals, and then suggests where to go from here:
The best option is to abandon creating generic themes altogether. There are no shortage of those in the Theme Directory, and it’s better to spend our time creating content-specific themes. Photoblog themes, travelogue themes, coming soon page themes, to mention some.
Word. Best way to go… no regrets here
Well said. My thoughts are that with the recent TwentyTen and TwentyEleven themes, developers have enough of a base theme to make customized child themes to please many clients.
I have to admit I am not sure about it. Actually, I am not sure what the author is talking about here. He takes the example of designing a horizontal menu without knowing what will be inside, that maybe there will be too many items and it will break the design. Ok, but it is the same for every kind of theme no ? Even content-specific themes.
BTW I do agree that it is a bad idea to create themes to fit every kind of situation. A blog theme is done for bloggers, a photoblog theme for photographs. And I don’t see myself creating generic themes for every situation. That sounds absurd.
I just don’t get some examples he gives in his post and the fact that we cannot design without content. You never know in advance what the users will insert in the theme. Even if you don’t have to think too much generic, you still have to think about every situation that could happen while using the theme.
So what should be the solution ? You need content to create the design but you don’t know what the user’s content is going to be…
Am I missing something here ?