New Orchard CMS Blog

As one of my many New Year’s resolutions, I’ve decided to blog more. The problem I have is trying to find the time to sit down and write articles, this is one of the main reasons I took up Twitter. So over the post-Christmas period I squeezed in the time to quickly convert my old Blog Engine.NET blog to Orchard. Luckily, the BlogML module made it a breeze and all that was required to do was to skin with a design. Having looked that the available themes in Orchard (which is somewhat an under contributed area) I decided to create my own loosely based on an existing Wordpress theme. I say “loosely based” for a reason as no design work/Photoshop was used; I just tweaked CSS until it looked “OK”. Therefore there are some areas of the layout that could be improved, but it will do for the time being and I’ll look at enhancing it over time.

From the outset I knew I wanted the site to be responsive so that the layout adapted to the device’s screen resolution and the content was prioritised based on available screen real estate. I took a Mobile First Approach which allowed me to really look hard at what content was important. I then layered features and content for larger screens and modern browsers using progressive enhancement techniques.