I’ve taken the Fluid Baseline Grid (originally created by Josh Hopkins) and converted it into a mobile-first, typographically clear WordPress theme.
Features:
- Typography for easy reading, which you can see with the default, lined background (that can be easily changed from within wordpress)
- Responsive and designed from a “mobile first” perspective. Even images are scaled responsively.
- Compensates for cross-browser inconsistencies using normalize.css (should display consistently across Google Chrome, Mozilla Firefox 4+, Apple Safari 5+, Opera 12+, and Internet Explorer 8+)
- SEO enhancements
- cuts down on duplicated content on archival pages by using excerpts
- h1 for each page is designated by the topic of the page, not always the website’s name
- homepage is setup to be unique, avoiding many duplicate content issues inherit to WordPress
- ready for Google Authorship with pages for each author, just add your Google Plus author link in your description
- I’ve added microformatted HTML to enable Google to see your posts as articles (see how Google interprets this article using the Google Structured Data Testing Tool)
- I’ve taken as many steps as possible to keep this theme running quickly. I’ve minified all the working CSS and JavaScript files and enqueued them, for quicker loading times.
- Supports the following WordPress features:
- menus
- dynamic sidebar and widgets
- optional sidebars on posts or pages
- custom background images and colors
- featured images per post displayed both in page archives and prominently at the top of each post.
- post/page pagination and only displays comments on the last page of each paginated post/page
- How to use:
- Please feel free to change the fonts and colors of different elements in the style.css file but if you want to keep the typographic benefits of this theme, do not change font sizes, margins or any sort of spacing. In fact, this is what I’ve done on this website.
- Recommend setting Settings > Reading > Blog Pages Show at Most to a multiple of 3, since this is based-upon a three-column grid for all pages that display more than one post.
If you’d like to see a live-version of this theme, please visit my personal site: http://zimorama.com/ (and this site is running a child-variant of the theme as well).