As background, I've been using WA for around a year now,
site #1 is just going through its first "restyle" and I've just
started development on site #2 for another client. I’m not a web designer by
trade.
Both the suggestions in the initial post would be most
welcome, especially the "Web Designer Guide" idea. This would be a
great time saver.
Whilst I agree with mitchiedog’s comments above I do also
feel that an active forum ought to be worthwhile. I’ve found that WA users are
usually very willing to try to assist each other via existing forums so I think
that the “designer community” could work well. Of course, evidenced by the
lack of responses to this thread in the 3 months it’s been active, I could well
be wrong :-)
One of my major difficulties is knowing what can/cannot be
changed easily via the “Colors & Styles” route and what required delving
into the CSS files. Customisation of the various themes is made difficult
because there is not a great deal of consistency across themes which on the
surface look similar to each other.
For example, in one theme I can quickly change the colour of
the background of the page footer, in another I can’t so I have find out the
Hex code of the colour I want to alter, access the CSS file and then search for
the right occurrence of that colour code, capture the offending code and then
paste it into my web site with the new colour. There can potentially be a lot of “suck it and see”
going on.
Other things I have found when attempting to switch themes
on an existing site emphasise the lack of consistency. At the moment I am
trying to find out how to change the large green column under the menu down the
left side of the “Modern Green 2” theme. I know the colour code but changing
any of the three places that number occurs has no effect so I don’t know how
that has been achieved.....
Similarly this theme has an image used for the “current
selection” menu item, now how do I replace that without knowing its size?
Really theme should not have these little idiosyncrasies, but the technique to
achieve them if needed should be well documented.
In my experience, most organisations, having picked the most
appropriate/appealing theme for their
site, want to brand it in their own colours. I imagine that a great deal of
site customisation consists of meeting this simple enough requirement. This could
be quickly & easily improved by having consistent themes and better
commented CSS files and as mentioned above: “if it has a colour –make it
editable”.
The design of new site themes should always, always be performed
bearing in mind that someone, somewhere will very soon want to change colours,
fonts, sizes and in the case of functional pages, the text displayed.
Finally WRT scott_btm (point 3): You can edit your site as admin
in firefox , and simultaneously review in IE 8 as a standard user. I use a
dual-screen system which makes this much easier but is not essential.
Regards,
Ian
Worthing and adur chamber of commerce