Donkey Kong WordPress Theme – Ver. 1

I love it. Before being able to comment all that effectively I’d need to spend some time with it, but it looks great. Is it widget ready?

@Jeff Rivera:

For time and efficiency, I based the design off of an existing WordPress theme called “personal” at WPDesigner. You can check out most of the features for the template there, but to answer your question, this theme is widget ready.

PS. Added a search field right below Mario on the right in my design. Moved the other sidebar links down. This will be posted if I make arcade collector suggested design changes.

Looks great. Needs some DK blue on it somewhere. Of course, now we run the risk of all the arcade related blogs having the same theme…how much for a custom theme? 🙂

@Jeff:

Where would you suggest adding blue to the Donkey Kong theme? Give me some specifics. Otherwise I can leave that up to individuals to edit.

I think to customize the template I would do an hourly rate. I am pretty fast though, and after building the template I will be familiar with the code, so we’re talking minutes of an hourly rate.

I hope there will be other arcade game themes, but I can’t promise anything. I need to gauge response here first to see if this is something even worth spending my time on.

No idea…I have the artistic ability of a two year old with a 8 count box of crayons. It looks great as it is.

@Jeff:

The artwork for the original Donkey Kong was primarily orange, red and white. The cab was the only part that was really solid blue. By leaving this Donkey Kong WordPress Theme in this color scheme, it leaves the door open to doing a blue based Donkey Kong 2 theme if I want.

There are so many advantages from an SEO and promotion standpoint for using WordPress. I hope collectors would even consider porting over their existing website if they already have one. It isn’t just for ‘blogging’ by the standard definition.

As one who recently switched from another content management system to wordpress, I strongly agreed. I’m already seeing better traffic, mainly due to better search result placement. The pingbacks, trackbacks, etc. are just icing on the cake.

Hey thats way cool Jr!
I should have a Dk page like that for my DK2 production
But in Blue and Purple. : )
Can it be done or incorperated to what Ive allready got?
send me more details and what we need to do to make it happen.
Id like to change out the theme to go with the most current big project.

@Richard:

It would be easy enough to have a blog install in a folder in your site, and link to it. You could in theory switch the theme based on project, but the structure isn’t meant to be like that. You would have posts about Donkey Kong 2 with a DK2 theme, and then when you started posting about Agent X stuff, you’d change the theme, but the old links to the DK2 posts would now be going to a WordPress site that had Agent X graphics. You could have a million of separate little blogs, but that would be counter productive to have a whole install, using a database for each, for each project.

I like the look! You’ve inspired me to do my own wordpress install. I just hope my design comes out looking as nice as yours 🙂

@Hugh:

That is what I like to hear! And remember, you have a growing community of arcade WordPress Bloggers who will be here to help you with questions, including myself. Catch me online if you need with my chat module in the sidebar.

Which arcade design did you vote for?

I love it. Maybe make the light blue the main background color below the red/orange (instead of a white background). Looks great though!

Hey Jeff,

I saw your original poll. The reason I didn’t vote is that personally I wouldn’t use a theme dedicated to a single arcade game. That’s just my preference, so I figured voting when I have that preference wouldn’t make much sense.

I do think this theme looks great. I agree that maybe some DK cabinet blue would look good, maybe in the background where the white is currently. When I think of DK, I think of that blue cabinet color.

Another thing that I noticed…and I would normally not mention something like this but you did ask for opinions:
The orange/red striped background pattern you have behind everything conflicts with the same orange/red pattern inside the header itself. That looks a little strange to me, because the angles are different, but not different enough to be separated visually. As to suggestions for changing it if you wanted to…I prefer the angle of that pattern in the right side of the header behind Mario than I do for the one that is above and behind it. Maybe you could change that large orange/red pattern to the DK blue color without stripes. Or, maybe you could make it line up with the stripes in the header. Or, you could just leave it as is. 🙂

I’m just nitpicking…overall it looks great.

@Jamie:

I agree with you totally, and thought about the fact that people would not want a site dedicated to one game. If I feel like I will keep doing this, since it’s been only two hours ;), I would make Bally, Williams, Atari type sites. The combos are limitless really, only limited to already vectored artwork, that is where time would really come in.

I agreed with the comments on the blue, I changed it, and posted a new version. I think this was related to greatly to Donkey Kong not to change. But usually color changes are preference, and I would leave that up to the individual to change on their own site. Like in Jeff’s case, he could have swapped the striped background out with a light blue and left the bottom white.

I don’t agree with you actually on the stripes. They are a different color, which actually drops them back better from the foreground than to have the same orange. I also think that the direction is different enough. But…I didn’t drop the opacity down another 10%. I wanted to tie the right side characters together, but this may make a small change in noticeability.

Hey Jeff,

>I agreed with the comments on the blue, I changed it, and
>posted a new version.

I like that better. Looks more DK-ish.

>I don’t agree with you actually on the stripes. They are a
>different color, which actually drops them back better from
>the foreground than to have the same orange.

I’m red/green color blind. Anything with red or green in it appears slightly different to me. Maybe that’s why it looked a little weird. I borrow my wife’s eyeballs whenever I need to double check colors. To me, the colors of both patterns look the same (just different brightness). It does look better to me though with the opacity dropped.

The blue looks fantastic! Hey, I was just talking to someone here in the office, showing off your theme. He had an interesting question. Is there any way to rotate entire theme graphics and color schemes, similar to how my banner changes games each refresh? That would be a way to make the theme not locked into one game (say a multi-williams theme that looks like Joust with lots of brown, then a Robotron with silver, etc)? This is probably a bit too much to switch on a refresh, but would be pretty cool.

Jeff

@Jeff Waldron:

You can rotate the graphic and color schemes using stylesheets (css). You have to setup the WordPress site with that in mind though. And it is more work. But it is possible, just not something I would do on this one, or any other theme probably. I would rather have 10 options for arcade game themes, then one theme that can change to ten different looks. Again, leaving the customizing up to the end user, they’ll have to do some of that anyway.

So when do you need someone to beta test the theme? 🙂

@Jeff:
Sorry to disappoint. I got the bug today to make this Donkey Kong WordPress Theme as a design file. Making the actual theme package will have to wait. Probably will be around the first two weeks of May. I will do launch it when I do publicity through the WordPress Planet feeds, Weblog Tools. I don’t know if I will do beta testing…I can test for HTML…beyond that I don’t know that I will have time to test for every browser. There will be some assumed responsibility for troubleshooting on individual systems.

@Jeff:

I voted for the multi game website. I love the DK but I’d like to see other games featured, like what you have on your blog. Keep up the good work, I’ll be watching!

@Hugh:

I think that the multi arcade game WordPress theme will be my next choice. I should maybe have a poll on which manufacturer I should do first, but my guess would be overwhelmingly Atari. But not until the Donkey Kong theme is an actual working website. One thing at a time.

Did you get a domain name for your site? Or are you working on a copy locally for your WordPress install on Xampp?

Hello there!

I’m looking for a generic pinball theme, featuring both em and ss games, to fit my coming-soon blog 🙂

Any idea…?

@Federico Croci:

I don’t know of any free pinball WordPress themes, but I could design one for you. Use my contact form and we can talk about it if you like.

Is there now download link?

Looks like a nice theme

I decided that this Donkey Kong WordPress theme was not one I wanted to offer for free, and never built it out. If you would be interested in purchasing it exclusively drop me a line.

Getting ready to launch a completely free WordPress 3 ready free Donkey Kong Arcade theme – called ‘Kong Me Baby’.

Watch for it to launch this weekend. I will provide a link when live.

Hi, I was wondering if the files for this were available for download or purchase? Thanks!