Why indeed.  There are several reasons why I decided to base this blog’s design on a pre-existing template…

1.  Time

My blog is very much a side project alongside my main work – that is the work that pays the bills – for One Eighty Studios.

My spare time is largely taken up with looking after my young daughter and doing what I’m told by my loving wife so, all in all, a custom blog design isn’t a huge priority for me at this point.

2.  It’s a great template

Derek has built a really solid template on which to base a Wordpress blog.  The XHTML/CSS is clearly and semantically created and it plays nicely with the latest version of Wordpress.  That Derek then chooses to give this away and save huge amounts of time for people like me is awesome.

3. Wordpress is relatively new to me

Despite having been building websites professionally since 1996, I’ve only really started to tinker with Wordpress as a blogging engine and lightweight CMS over the last 12 months meaning there is plenty to learn – and so picking up a well built template that adheres to all of the standard Wordpress functionality and doesn’t include too much custom functionality is a great base on which to improve my Wordpress Fu.

With all of the above said, I have still made some reasonably significant adjustments.  I’ve changed a lot of CSS rules to fit my preferred style and have layered my own look and feel over the template and spent far too long tinkering with the finer points of the design.  I’ve added archive templates with a nifty plug-in as well as altering the general flow of the index template to incorporate both longer articles and shorter external links in the same screen – so it’s certainly got my mark on it.

So that, in a nutshell, is why I based the blog on a pre-baked template.