Lightly Toasted

When I had hand rolled my entire design for Karmakars.com, though simple sans flickr, del.icio.us and all those moronic buzz, it was nice and I was proud of it. I really was. No matter what one may think and how much ease a blog/website template or theme may provide, it is one sure way to kill originality. It lacks one big thing. It lacks you. Look around the web-o-sphere, notice how many people use K2 and Hemingway, and many such similar derivations of these themes. And nothing wrong with that, BUT this in my opinion probably isn’t the best choice for a professional web-designer, developer.

One thing I have surely noticed using a template or theme on my very own site is that fact that I do not take pride in the design because it truly isn’t mine to start with! Even if I were to change banners, headers, taglines, massage the styles, colour and font and give it a considerable overhaul, it still feels alien. And then, I loose interest. Eventually my desire to write relinquish. I have a love-hate relationship with that idea. I love the idea of trying out new templates and themes for WordPress and gettnig into the mind of the deisgner who built it piece by piece but I find it really hard(hate) to use it on my own site. This explains why I have changed so many themes in the last few months. They never felt like my own skin. Themes and Templates never do. There is no substitute to rolling your very own design.

So why don’t I do my own?

I’m fighting time to get on top of my chores but I’ll redesign pretty much from ground up soon. But until the time crunch resolves I’ll have to live with some sort of semi-customised theme. Much that I love the idea of themes and people making them available for free which I think is great, themes and templates really are not for me. Change is the only constant!