Changing themes is part of the exercise

For those who were following me from day one, 10 days ago, you would have noticed a big change in this site.

Yes, I am using Sadish’s MistyLook, except for the header image which I customized using other themes images. Not that there was something wrong with Derek Punsalan’s Grid Focus theme. In fact, it is one of my favorites for other self-hosted sites. I switched to a new theme as part of the exercise. I wanted to have a feel of how it is to “re-skin a blog” at WordPress.com.

Well, it was not that difficult after all. It took me only about 10 minutes to move to a different theme and re-set the widgets to display the same information.

Next time our friends ask me how it is to blog at WordPress.com, this is one story I can tell them.

By the way, is this theme XHTML 1.0 validated? I did check it and it is.

Updated 13 October: Experimenting with INove by mg12.

How to XHTML validate a WordPress theme

Selecting a WordPress theme is not all about the layout and other design elements. Consider also if the theme can pass the test of being XTHML valid.

For those who would like to know more about XHTML validation, you can refer to the W3 website or to this article “Are your webpages XTHML valid?” which I wrote some months ago.

To quickly check if each theme you like is XHTML valid, run it against this test by entering your WordPress.com URL onto W3′s validation at http://validator.w3.org.

When I ran my WordPress.com URL using this current theme, the test results came out with 3 validation errors. Yes, I wanted a perfect score, but to me anything less than 10 errors is quite acceptable.

Is your theme XTML valid? If it yields with more than 10 errors even without any post yet, drop it. It’s not worth tweaking.