We recently considered redesigning our website here at Kombine. It’s a hazard of the web design profession—the urge to constantly tinker with whatever is currently online. The problem is that we still like the current (classic) design and have gotten a lot of positive feedback on it. We didn’t want to abandon it, but we’re also interested in trying something new.

A solution to our dilemma arrived in the form of CSS themes. After a bit of fiddling with JavaScript and alternate stylesheets, visitors to our site can now select a theme of their choice and completely refashion the look of the site with a single click. Give it a try—you can choose a theme by selecting it in the drop-down menu in the upper-right corner of this page.

We’ve set up two main themes (”classic” and “cool breeze”) with large print alternatives for each. Plus there’s a high contrast version (larger print with light text on a dark background) as well as a completely unstyled version in case you’re into that sort of thing.

Offering alternate site themes that radically reshape page layout and design (such as switching from “classic” to “cool breeze”) makes sense on a site offering web design services, but would probably not benefit many other businesses. The ability to offer large print versions of a site however, has a universal application and should be more pervasive on the web.

Setting up a website for theming requires a strict separation between structure and style. We eliminated inline styles and image tags as much as possible and of course, laying out the pages with CSS rather than tables is imperative. The graphic look of our themes is created with CSS and background images and the style switching is handled with a slightly modified version of the script described in this article on A List Apart.

Some time ago, I submitted a custom CSS page style for Vienna, an open source newsreader for the Mac. Today, I went to the downloads page to update my copy of Vienna and discovered that the style I submitted, “Prague” is now bundled with the software. Sweet.

If you haven’t tried Vienna yet, give it a shot—it’s an excellent, full-featured and free alternative to paid newsreaders. And you can give Prague a whirl by selecting it from the View / Style menu.

Months and months ago I started bugging Kreg about setting up a blog for Kombine.net. It didn’t take long before he had WordPress installed, up and running. And then… Well, I realized that I barely had time to think about the business’ blog, never mind actually writing some of these thoughts down. But I did make time to think about it over time, and here we are.

First, if you haven’t already, check out the site and let us know what you think. Next I’d like to point out our Industry News aggregation widget [News from around the web »]. It’s another one of Kreg’s creations and one that can be habit forming.

Brian has also put together a couple of cool apps that you may find useful. If you are struggling with leviathan-length URLs, head over to Shortify. If you’d like to quickly create a web page or make some notes publicly or privately, check out his Wikinote.

Recent projects here have included:

• Launching TechnicalProse.com
• The refresh of the Mr Box site, mostly the CSS and backend functionality
• Ongoing maintenance and backend functionality enhancements for ProTrails.com
• A bunch of stuff we can’t say a lot about for a well known technology company, including marketing collateral and sales training

Semi-random suggested reading: The Best of Brochure Design 9
This series of books has been a running favorite at Kombine for several years.