Finally, the time has come to dust off the old website—which I have been tinkering with since 2006 years now—to bring in the new.
The new being a fully responsive WordPress website, blog and portfolio based on the Foundation/Boilerplate Framework and a modified, by moi, Foundation theme. I have written a WordPress plugin which does the portfolio part. It is soon going to be published on wpquestions.com.
I have had many attempts over the last years to get my website up-to-speed, but time and money and some personal problems + health issues (yes I have so many excuses) always pushed me in a different direction. Although my site was OK being a dark grunge theme from woothemes which I customised heavily, I knew that under the hood it totally sucked at usability and incredibly messed up HTML and CSS. In effect it was my live sandbox ( which is no good) as I tried to do developing and coding live whenever I got time.
The end result was a design that I pretty much like, but lacked the details I so desperately wanted but couldnt do due to lack of knowledge and experience. So the website floundered in this state for some time whilst I kept on the look out for a way to turn the tables. Finally my friend Jamshaid suggested I should make a clean site and I don’t know what happened, the idea clicked me and I started working on it on the weekends and here is the result of the hard work from me and my friends, i.e Jamshaid for logo and general artistic feedback and Bilal Sarwar for his photography.
Responsive
Hard to miss how much this buzz word has infiltrated our minds, and with that I realised that any new site design without being responsive would be foolish and a complete waste of time.
Last week I took the charge and started researching all that was out there for responsive WordPress themes to see if anything came up close to my existing site design. Certainly plenty of responsive themes, but only a few came remotely close to what I wanted: Ari by Elma Studio being a worthy candidate. In fact I did play with this for a day or so, but a few features lacking caused me some hurdles that I couldn’t quite overcome.
In my search I came I found some really nice Frameworks, but unless you have time and knowledges of developing these would prove to be far too technical for me to work with.
Foundation
One framework in particular, Foundation, caught my eye but I still had the same “lack o’skill” problem that plagues me in these situations. That being said I wasn’t about to give up on Framework, as it did look damn sexy, and could easily imagine my website rocking a Foundation framework.
I decided to spend some time, on a seemingly futile excersise, Googling “WordPress themes made with Foundation framework” and one entry nearly slipped my notice. I really thought that finding someone who had took the time to actually develope a bare bones WordPress theme with the Foundation Framework would be slim at best, but apparently I was being too cynical.
Not too much to read about the theme it as it is located on Github, but the developer, Drew(symo) states:
Foundation, for WordPress, is a blank starter theme with the exceptional capabilities of ZURB’s Foundation Framework and HTML5 Boilerplate.
As a neat-freak designer, it’s sometimes intimidating and frustrating looking at a WordPress theme framework that’s jam-packed with unnecessary extras and bloated code. That’s why I created Foundation, for WordPress, which offers only the necessary essentials to get your site running, with all the jazz of responsive web-design.
Features of Foundation Theme
Foundation, for WordPress, features everything ZURB’s Foundation Framework and HTML5 Boilerplate have to offer, however, some changes have been made to tailer it to WordPress, these include:
- All your common WordPress template files
- Orbit for WordPress, ZURB’s image and content slider tailored for WordPress, with the ability to manage your slider through WordPress
- A ySlow score of 95 (in regards to ‘Small Site or Blog’)
- SEO features such as an optimised Google Analytics snippet, robots.txt and Schema.org attributes
- Beautiful, coda-style tooltips
- Reveal for WordPress, a simple modal box by ZURB made to work in WordPress
- A function to provide Google’s jQuery CDN over WordPress’ local copy
- Failsafe jQuery, with a fallback to WordPress’ local copy
To Sum Up
There is a long story version which I would find all too easy to explain in fine detail so this is the short version. I basically spent, almost, every waking minute from Friday morning to midnight Sunday remodelling Drew’s WordPress Foundation theme to what you see before you now.
It’s certainly not 100%, but I am absolutely thrilled with the general layout, typography and specifically knowing that everything under the hood is lean, mean and super clean. There are a few things that need to be ironed out in terms of details as well as a few responsive type bugs.
For the most part the new fahdmurtaza.com site is a brand spanking new platform from which to show my web development/ design portfolio and blog articles so I really couldn’t be more pleased, more so as I managed to do it all by myself. It’s a relief to know that the backed is also running cleanly as well as the site working well on a number of mobile devices, including the iPhone and iPad.
There is no way I could have managed this without the hard work that Drew put into creating the Foundation theme from the Foundation Framework so a huge thanks to Drew for that.
Do You Like This Responsive Theme?
As a little something from me to you I will be packaging this minimal and responsive WordPress theme, and making it available as a download. The core theme consists of a one column portfolio page template, two column featured project page template, two column blog and index pages.
If you are looking for a responsive and minimal style blog and portfolio, then I hope this might be of interest to you. you’ll be free to chop and change it to your heart’s content. The Foundation Framework is built on the following grid, and is just a pleasure develop and design design around.
Leave me a note below if you think you might be interested in the theme.
