Themes

Themes will change the way your website(s) look and feel.
It is not essential to deal with theming your website(s) at this stage.
I did because once I had decided that I wanted my site to look a certain way and had gone through innumerous articles, tips, and suggestions on what to use ... and I had spent some long hours at Drupal's Contributed Themes section, I found the contributed theme I was going to try and use.

And once I had that decision made (successful implementation would be dependant on whether I could actually install it without too much difficulty and be able to tweak it) ... I found it very hard to concentrate on building my site without knowing how the theme I had chosen would affect the look and feel of my site(s). So I decided to jump in and put my theme in place. That way, as I worked with my sites, I would have some idea of what it might look like. This is especially so as I had read that the placement of various regions, blocks, primary & secondary links can look different depending on what your theme was.

Theme: Zen

I have gone with this contributed theme. Heard it mentioned all over the place, read up a bit about it (multiple times) ... but you can only understand so much (or little) via reading and a whole lot more when you actually start using it.

The reasons why I chose this theme:

• seemed very popular and highly recommended
• seemed to be saying that it is the basic building block of themes - with clear CSS and with the promise I could better tweak and change it for the final look I wanted
• visited the demo page "Zen Garden" - which is delicious! (and of course spent some time there)
• and last but not least, when I looked at the Issues associated with this contributed theme, I could see that not only were a lot of bugs fixed, but that attention to these issues and suggested features was very active and current.