P&O Cruise Ship Blogs Powered by Thesis Theme

I was booking my cruise holiday today from Brisbane to Noumea, Lifou and Vila for 7 days and discovered that the P&O Cruises blog site for their ships the Pacific Dawn and the Pacific Jewel are powered by Thesis Theme. Here’s some code snippets using Firebug to show you how easy it is to make a unique site.

Firebug – a great Firefox addon – allows you to peek at the background code while looking at the pages. In the screenshot below you can see the html and css code for the image link of a ship in the sidebar.

• To use Firebug, once you have it installed, you activate it and hover over the code until the portion you are interested in is shaded. You can see the html in the left-hand window and the corresponding css in the right-hand window.

• You can also change the colour of elements to see how different it would look with a different colour (or font size, etc) and preview it without actually making any changes. For example, I don’t recommend P&O change their site colours to black and green.

Customizing Thesis with a few simple changes is often as easy as using a unique header, a matching background and consistent accent colours in the nav menu, sidebar and headline areas.

Following are some code snippets for the P&O blog site using Firebug to illustrate how easy it is to customize Thesis Theme and create a unique site.

Unique Header & Background

P&O incorporates their header image with a solid background colour:

Unique Sidebars

Orange headlines and orange bottom border lines are achieved with a few tweaks to the custom.css file:

Headline Meta Accent

You can choose to alter the colour of the headlines, comment counts, author name and date for example. P&O add a splash of orange to the comment meta:

P&O also use the same orange colour for the ‘Read the full article‘ link in their distinctly Thesis Theme teasers:

Nav Menu background Image

You can colour your nav menu background or use a background image. P&O uses a background image for the nav menu:

If it looks like a Thesis Theme site – It probably is

I see lots of blogs and websites that look like Thesis and am no longer surprised when I check, to discover they actually are.

How to check if it is a site is powered by Thesis

If you stumble across a site that you think is powered by WordPress that looks a bit like Thesis, right click in the header area or background image and view the image.

If the url address has …/thesis/… in its path, it probably is a thesis site. See the example screenshot below for the P&O site:

What you can learn

If you find a site you like the look of and it is a Thesis site, then you can get your own Thesis site to look similar by learning how they did what they did or asking a designer to do something similar.

You can use Firebug and other plugins to view the css for the page and reverse engineer something similar yourself without too many problems – just make sure you do backups before tweaking your css so you can undo any unintended consequences. I learnt html and css by trial and error and can now create a unique site in a weekend.

I would caution against using the same code outright – you don’t want to breach copyright.

You can adapt the code for your own purposes and sometimes tutorials offer you free use of the code. Just make sure you understand the context and if it is okay to use it.

The code snippets in this post for example are not mine, they are used for illustrative and review purposes only to demonstrate how easy it is to customize Thesis and use firebug. I also wanted to show a large commercial enterprise using Thesis Theme.

Here are the links to the P&O Cruise blog sites: Pacific Jewel ~ Pacific Dawn.

Now…I’m going back to plan my day trips in Noumea…