In 2007, I established the domain karensquilting.com and built Karen a web site there. Over the next 6 1/2 years the page and the site remained virtually unchanged. Karen has never done any web site development work and I only do it on occasion any more.
Karen does have a blog, though, Quilts… etc, where she is quite active and has a good number of regular readers and commenters. She has 2,238 posts in about 6 1/2 years, which works out to about 28 posts per month, with an average just over 7 comments per post in that time
Not too shabby.
She asked me a while back to do something with the old site that we’ve done nothing with in forever. This week, I’ve been playing around with the Thesis 2.1 framework, so decided to use karensquilting.com to practice with.
I wanted to make sure than anyone who “accidentally” landed on the top domain page would be referred to the blog. Of course, I could have made that an automatic redirect, but I wanted to see what I could do using Thesis 2.1.
And this is the result:
The actual page at karensquilting.com has a grey background around the above box and the links work.
I’ve been using Thesis for several years. It was initially much easier to work with than other commercial WordPress themes. In fact, it was much more that just a theme. It let the user control much more than other themes did without having to actually get into the themes code to do it.
Unfortunately, starting with version 2.0, Thesis did a significant paradigm shift in how it works and in the user interface. I tried working with it for a while and then just walked away from it, deciding to stay with the earlier version in the meantime.
Coming back to it this time, I guess I approached it differently. I sat through quite a few tutorials on YouTube and Vimeo, including four where the Thesis creator, Chris Pearson, explained his “vision” of what Thesis is supposed to be.
Developing the page involved very little actual coding. I think I may have added 2 or 3 lines of CSS and copied some application codes to the appropriate location. I still have more to figure out for future projects and may have to get into code a little bit.
The code below is part of the HTML for the karensquilting.com landing page. I didn’t directly create any of it, but much of it is a product of what I did in Thesis.
