For this website I decided to develop my own template so it was unique. I think it may be a plus point in search engine ranking algorithms to have a unique template. Also, I don’t have to include a link to the template author’s site on every page.

The downside to this approach is that my design skills are not as good as many specialists but with each new site, I seem to improve.

I am powering the site with the WordPress blogging script since this is an excellent content management system. This time, I took things a stage further by aiming to have all the pages on my site managed by Wordpress, even sales pages. This is made possible by the custom templates feature. So now I can edit the content of these pages easily from within the WordPress admin area.

One tricky thing I found with designing WordPress Templates is that referencing HTML elements with CSS styles can be tricky. Also, when you save content, the script changes your code if you used DIVs or Tables. So I found that these were best avoided when editing content. Instead, set up CSS styles for paragraphs and images instead. It seems to be no problem to embed CSS class references in the page content within the WordPress admin area.

For the width of the site, I wanted it to fit inside a 800×600 pixel browser window. This was made more difficult by my choice of a 3 column design. The reason I need 3 columns is because I want to advertise Kiosk.ws and show a MyBlogLog community widget in the right sidebar. Also I want to have navigation links in a left sidebar. And, I want these to show up above the fold.

This makes the content area a bit narrow, but I think it is acceptable. It just leaves little room to show any of the background outside of the edges of the web page.

One thing that I missed at first is that the right scroll bar eats into the page width, but only when your page grows beyond the height of the browser window. So to avoid a horizontal scroll bar appearing, make sure you account for this. In the end, my page width was 760px. When I view it in IE7, FireFox and Opera browsers it seems to work OK.

For pages with no need for 3 columns such as my “About” page, I use a 2 column template and for the Sales pages, I have a single-column template.

I wanted to cater for 800×600 browsers so I don’t lose visitors that may be using older hardware. My site is aimed at all kinds of people.

Anyway, I hope you like the design so far.