I’m very proud to announce the launch of FavePersonal; a WordPress theme designed for personal websites. I have been using (and building and testing) FavePersonal on this site since August of last year and I am very pleased with what we’ve created.

The features for FavePersonal were driven by my goals for version three of this site. I wanted the site to be personal, be a great showcase for my content and to integrate with my other social interactions online.

Personal

One of the features I know people will enjoy playing with is the Colors feature. Instead of fiddling with lots of different color pickers, you can select from thousands of existing color palettes (via Adobe Kuler integration) and instantly preview and apply the scheme to your site.

The header options and bio widget features were created to help tell the “this is who I am, and what this site is” story. Most visitors arrive on an internal site page via search engine or direct link. These features serve to provide some context about both you, and your site.

All Kinds of Post Content

With FavePersonal we have integrated our post formats admin UI functionality to make it easy to post photos, galleries, videos, etc. Each of these types of content is elegantly managed and delivered, from the back-end admin interface all the way through to customized layouts appropriate for each type of content, and formatted elegantly for mobile devices (even extending to your RSS feeds).

See some examples on this site:

• Status posts
• Link posts
• Photo posts
• Gallery posts (be sure to check out a gallery post)
• Video posts

Social

If my site is going to represent me on the web, it’s not telling a complete story if it ignores my participation on other social networks. FavePersonal tightly integrates with (and includes) the Social plugin to create a two way integration between your website, Twitter and Facebook. You can post status updates on your site then pass them on to your Twitter and Facebook accounts. Social will bring retweets, likes and reactions from those sites back to your site as comments.

Additionally, your visitors can log in with their social profiles when they comment directly on your site.

Mobile-Friendly

FavePersonal was designed from the ground up to be responsive. Not only does it look great on your computer, but also on your phone and tablet device.

Are you on a mobile browser now? Check out the online demo and see how it works. Be sure to rotate and see how it adapts to portait and landscape orientations.

Of course it is optimized for fast page loads and also features clean HTML5 markup that is both human and machine (SEO) friendly.

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This is just a very brief sampling of what we’ve put into FavePersonal. We’ve been working on this theme for over a year.¹ We’ve given every feature a ton of thought, debate, tweaking, building, throwing away, re-building and testing to get things the way we want them. I’ve been told I can be a bit particular , which is a kind way of saying I’m a pain in the arse and we’ll re-design things as many times as it takes to get it right. My team has been very patient with me, coming up with great ideas and solutions and building them in elegant ways. We’ve built deep features on solid foundations that won’t break or surprise you as you lean on them and come to rely on them.

I’m going to be following up with a series of posts that go into more detail about the various features of FavePersonal, discussing some of the design decisions we made, and sharing customizations I’ve put into my own child theme. I’ll also point to some of the code we’ve released on our GitHub account for anyone who would be interested. I’ve got a pretty good sized list. 🙂

When I started using FavePersonal in August of last year (2011) it became the third version of this site since it launched in 2002 (check out original version from 2002 and the previous version from 2006). With each iteration I always received a number of “is your theme available?” inquiries. In the past, my themes have always been built with too many content assumptions, etc. for me to effectively share it, but I made sure we didn’t do that with FavePersonal.

Check out the FavePersonal page on the Crowd Favorite website to see our feature videos, try out online demo and purchase (our new store² supports PayPal as well as credit cards).

I hope you like it as much as I do!

This post is part of the following projects: Personal Theme, Social. View the project timelines for more context on this post.