You might notice a new design if you visit my blog today. I’ve added a new theme to our WordPress installation that users can apply to give their blog the Middlebury College look-and-feel. Well, a version of it at least. This is the design approved by College Communications for use in applications where the full design would be impractical to apply and/or where the content is not necessarily the voice of the school’s administration. WordPress meets both of these criteria.

The design is straight forward and simplistic, but it gives more flexibility in terms of page width than any of the other templates currently available to our users. This is helpful for bloggers who want to add wide content to their blogs, like big images or videos. Most of the other WordPress themes we’ve installed limit the user to less than 400 pixels of width for their content. This design also gives the viewer the opportunity to switch to a fixed-width view if they so desire (see the links in the top right corner of this blog).

If you want to apply this to your blog, log in at http://chisel.middlebury.edu/wordpress/wp-admin, click on the Design tag in the top-left under your blog’s name, scroll down until you see “Middlebury” in the list and click on it’s name. You should be all set. Check your blog to make sure that everything is in order. If something’s not in order, please send me an email letting me know.

Working on this has given me some of the basic knowledge that I’ll need as I work on my next project: designing a template for the New England Review so they can transfer their site content into WordPress.