This is actu­ally the fourth design of my per­sonal web­site. Recently I talked to some­one who said he’d vis­ited my web­site and liked the design, but say­ing it was obvi­ous I didn’t make it myself. I believe that is prob­a­bly the best com­pli­ment any­one can give to you while at the same time man­ag­ing to insult you. For the record I did design my own web­site for obvi­ous rea­sons, but he was right in some respect. The main com­po­nents of my cus­tom tem­plate are the following

• Since I work in the IT indus­try I liked my web­site to have a futur­is­tic look so I cre­ated the “evil eye” which, If you know the movie, bears a strik­ing resem­blance to the HAL 9000 com­puter from “2001: A Space Odyssey”. I make slice­able web­de­signs in Illus­tra­tor and used my own Illus­tra­tor SEO tem­plate for the job. This web­de­sign tem­plate cor­re­spond beau­ti­fully with it’s sta­tic HTML / CSS coun­ter­part to give you a good head­start when design­ing a website.
• Because of it’s supe­rior CSS struc­tur­ing with columns I reverse engi­neered the CSS for the main con­tent from the WordPress.org web­site itself.
• I used the dynamic header gen­er­a­tor from the Word­Press Twen­tyTen Theme to be able to give dif­fer­ent posts and pages dif­fer­ent banners.
• At first I had a sta­tic footer with some triv­ial infor­ma­tion. I removed it for a dynamic four col­umn footer which I can manip­u­late from the backend.

Related posts:

1. Trou­bleshoot­ing your Word­Press site
2. SEO Tem­plate — The CSS tem­plate file
3. SEO Tem­plate — CSS best practices