The metamorphosis of my blog from birth until now.
Blogger
Blue and green boxes
Everyone starts with default, right?
Terrace diary
After learning a bit of CSS I managed to make this one with a fixed background. I learnt a lot trying to make it, which made it easier to produce more. I felt this one was too busy and difficult to read so I made something different.
Blue and purple
Not wanting to waste the cartoon that I made, I integrated it into something much less busy.
WordPress
Blue
Upon my move to WordPress I tweaked the look that I already had. Changing the shadow from blue to grey, making the black lines thinner and adding some 1px borders to sharpen it up. I had a bit of fun with the footer too, “This and that was brought to you by the letter A and the number 2.”
Red heart
I called it red although it’s a little more on the pink side. I felt the need for something warmer than blue. This one is simpler too, fewer images (e.g. for sidebar headings), just simple CSS, with a touch of hubby’s javascript to roll up the sidebar menus.
Grey stripes
As you can see I’m very creative with names /* end sarcasm */. I was inspired by designers’ sites that were grey with splashes of colour. People didn’t like the font in the header and sidebar, but I still do. It was grungy… I like grungy things.
Christmas ’06
I added some Christmas lights to my existing template. I was feeling festive that Christmas. 😁
Angels January 2007
My most popular theme yet (from the comments I received). I liked this one a lot. The font in the sidebar was pretty, it was the first time I’d made a header image in Inkscape, the top menu buttons slid down when you hovered over them, it was all good fun.
Copyblogger June 2007
My variation on the Copyblogger theme by Chris Pearson. It overtook my angels theme in popularity and I love the simplicity of it.
Pink for October 2007 — in support of Breast Cancer Awareness month
Ocean blue November 2007
Searching for the king Christmas 2007
kristarella.com January 2008
I changed the name of the site because “This and that” was a bit of a lame name and didn’t really mean anything. kristarella doesn’t necessarily mean much either, other than it’s the name I’ve been using on the internet for the last few year.
I kept the Copyblogger ocean theme until May 2008.
kristarella.com mid 2008
I learnt so much through using the Copyblogger theme and helping others use it that I wanted to write my own theme from scratch. I thought a lot about semantic code and readability and tried to make something simple, but unique.
kristarella.com on Thesis
While I was doing honours in Molecular Biology during 2008 I also learnt all about the Thesis theme. After a few months of helping people with CSS and PHP on the Thesis forums I finally got around to porting my site design to Thesis.
Kristarella Studios
When I launched Kristarella Studios at the start of 2009 I created a new site design to go with it. I wanted to strip all the excess material and got rid of sidebars all together, making it easier to focus on blog posts, photography and business.
2011
Around this time it looks like I got into the habit of changing my theme close to annually. This one was using some subtle textures, gradients, and highlights.
The image at the top of the sidebar showed the lastest image from my photoblog.
Overlap 2012
I think I called this one overlap for the different shades of colour where different elements meet.
2013
I wanted to go really minimal and gradually build on this theme. To be honest, I don’t remember how that went!
Genesis 2014
Sometime after the launch of Thesis v2 I started to use the Genesis theme framework for some client work, and I also started to use it on my own sites.
Oddly, this child theme behaved remarkably similar to Twenty Fifteen, the default WordPress theme that launched at the end of 2014: a fixed header, menu, and sidebar on the left, content scrolling on the right.
late 2014
Trying out the full-screen header and panels thing.
Modern Studio Pro 2015
I changed to a child theme from the StudioPress store in 2015 and stuck with it for nearly 5 years 😮, including a domain change to kristarella.com.
Revolution Pro 2020
I was feeling the new year, new theme vibe. I didn’t want to change too much, but wanted to be able to take better advantage of the Gutenberg editor in WordPress, launched last year. This is another Genesis child theme from StudioPress with some tweaks of my own.
