№ 4. Bleen – A grue (green and blue) free WordPress theme

Bleen is a green and blue theme, very light (less than 25k) fast loading, optimized for search engines and valid – both xhtml and css. It is fit for eco, nature, company or even personal blogs.

The name

As you know, bleen is a conceptual color invented by philosopher Nelson Goodman. It may also be a number, between 6 and 7, or a day between Tuesday and Wednesday.
The theme’s name is refering to all these things: oddly enough, it forecasts accents of blue and green; it is built on a grid with intermediate widths; finally, I designed it almost without knowing, I began by tweaing the grid and the next minute wondered how shoult I name the theme.

The features

• Low fats: The unzipped theme folder wheights about 25k; in spite of its weight, the theme is fully functional. The low fats feature enables you to customize it as you please. Anyway, I cannot garantee it will load this fast after you add external bits of code.

• Flexibility: The theme is built on a special grid containing 32 classes of width. You actually can do anything within that frame. For instance, you can create ad spots anywhere you like, as the grid has apropriate classes for every IAAB ad dimention. Or you easily can change the layout of your blog. As said before, anything you want.

• Optimized titles: homepage, single page, archives, tags, pages and search results.
• Easy navigation.
• Custom 404 error message.
• A special attention to blockquotes (since blogging is a matter of linking and citing).
• A fresh look.
• No sponsored links (I think it’s worth mentionning).

Screenshots

Bleen (free WordPress theme)

As you can see, I was impatient to share this theme and couldn’t prepare a proper demo installation. If nothing unexpected occurs, the demo blog should be online during the next three days. Until then, you can watch these two screenshots and get a general idea about how it looks on an actual blog.

Screenshot 1: Homepage

Screenshot 2: Single page

Download

bleen (zipped, 12,3kb)

How to optimize it even more

I bet you wouldn’t belive me if I told you that you could add further optimizations to this theme. Well, you can. Being a public released theme, it has to be fit for any wordpress blog in this creation, so it has to make extensive use of php. But your blog is unique, so you can replace, where possible, the heavy php with plain html; if you’ll do this change, your blog will load even faster and decrease the usage of the server resources.

If you don’t feel comfortable with the code and want me to optimize the theme for your blog, you can drop me a line using the contact page. Don’t forget to provide me the url of the blog you want optimized.

Licence

The theme is released under a GNU/GPL v.2 licence (attribution, share alike).

Tags: 3 columns, company, nature, personal

Published on the 24th of November, 2008, in free themes · Print