The WordPress Sandbox Theme

One of the advantages of WordPress is that it supports and uses Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) technology.

The most obvious example of CSS can be found in the list of “themes” a WordPress blogger can find via Dashboard->Presentation->Themes. You can try out various themes. If you find one you prefer to your current theme, then you can change the appearance of your blog by the press of a web button.

For example, you can see different themes at the Fallen Soldiers and Chay Project sites.

A few days I started a new project, Python Bytes. Wanting a very clean appearance for this project, which will explore the programing language Python, I searched through the current inventory of themes.

I settled on one I hadn’t seen before, as I was stunned by its simplicity when I first tried it out. Indeed, it is the theme closest to what I take as the gold standard of simple, unadorned, effective web site design: apache.org.

It was “Sandbox-10,” written by Andy Skelton and Scott Allan Wallick.

Well done, Andy and Scott! I suspect you are programmers at heart, and also folks who like to live a simple, default life. Kudos to you.

I learned later, as you can by yourself, that much of the simplicity derives from the design goal that this theme is both useful out of the box, and is also a good starting point for customization. See Sandbox Friday.

I have purchased the CSS upgrade option, and plan to explore it in the future, but for now I have many things to write about, notably the k12openminds07 conference, and so will attempt to avoid the temptation to diddle, fiddle, and twiddle.

Indeed, I will try to show my example my belief that things are best when kept simple, and so will see how far I can go with just the default Sandbox options.