Valhalla Island

The winner of the Wordpress theme competition was Durable (you have to click the link to actually see a demo site, that’s annoying) by a guy named Andy Peatling. Out of the box it looks quite nice, it’s pretty, it’s wide, perhaps too wide, it’s organised into neat little boxes, very similar to the way Squible looks.

My first thoughts were, it’s ok. Something that really stuck out for me was the serif menu, comments and date with sans-serif everything else. If you’re really careful and use them in the right way sans-serif and serif can go well together. Large sans headings with a serif text body can sometimes look good. I think durable mixes the two too often. My first impression left me wondering why it had won.

I poked around for a little while and found why it had won. I didn’t find something amazing that blew me away, instantly making me release why it would beat the hundreds of others. I just found why it had won. At the top, in the menu bar is a link to an options panel that pops up over the page. In this options panel you can change just about any colour of anything on the page and it saves your preferences. Yeah, how cool.

A lot of words come to mind when I see features like this, practicality, usefullness, individuality. It’s a shame that things like this win people prizes. The tag line is “Let your users be in control of their own colors and settings.” Why? I’m interested to know if anyone has been to a website and thought “I really wish I could change all these colours to suit my own preference”? What if every website had this ability, would you change every website you visit to your favourite colours? Would spend any time changing any at all?

I’m a firm believer in the designer knowing what the users want better than the user does. There’s an absolutely perfect example of this. Myspace. The default template isn’t the most beautiful thing in the world but it’s 100 times better than the way nearly everyone completely destroys their pages with their own code. Rival Purevolume handles this brilliantly, they have designed a beautiful and functional default theme that users can’t change. I hear you ask, ‘what if they don’t like it and want to change it?’ Not being able to change them is for the greater good of all Purevolume users.

If the only thing a user can’t change on your website is the basic structure you’ve lost all sense of individual style expressed through your own page designs, colour decisions, etc. I think that the prize should have gone to the most well designed theme.