About Us >> About the Website >> Website Themes
Website Themes
Here are some screenshots of a few of our themes, together with instructions upon how to use them - and even design them. |
A classic design embedded in our minds by the prettiness co-ordinator over at Tittenfick Netzdesign; we have atop our screen the legendary banner, featuring some bizarrely random photographs of Dipsos doing the drinking.
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In order to avoid the terrible situation whereby somebody in work says to you "Oi! What the fack are you doing on that website!?" Tittenfick Netzdesign netzdesigned a variation of the website that looks (without too close an inspection) like something official, or at least not-drink-related. There is no banner, and no photos are available for viewing; which adds to the wonderful façade.
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This site was suggested by Ruth, after Pshstio McGyps was heard to say that there weren't really many other themes that one could do. He immediately sprung into action to make this a reality. It's classy and a half!
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With the entire membership of the Dipsomania Society being officially recorded as being gay, Dipso Davros thought it best to offer a gay theme so people don't need to close down the dipso website when they want to view something gay.
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Dipso Dom thought to himself "after beer, cider & wine, what comes next?" And the obvious answer is "vomit". Check out the delightful "before" photo of Jiff, and the "after" photo of Wilko/Oaf.
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In order to try a new theme, follow these instructions:-
1. Select "Change website theme" - This option is at the top left of the site, between "Invite a friend" and "Log out", in about the same place as you type your username and password in when you log in to the site. Alternatively you can click on the words "Change website theme" to be magically transported to the kingdom of theme-changing.
2. Choose your theme - At the top of your screen it will say "Website Theme:" and then show your current theme within a box. If you have never changed your theme before this will read "Default". Click on the arrow to the right of this box, and a drop down list will appear. Select your new theme from this list by clicking on it.
3. Submit your changes - Towards the bottom of the page with the Website Theme list there are two buttons marked Submit. Click on the top one. Wait.
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In order to design and submit a new theme, follow these instructions:-
1. Design your images - Microsoft Paint is crap, use Adobe PhotoShop or Jasc/Corel PaintShop instead. There is also a free open source graphics package called The Gimp. The banner should be exactly 82 pixels high and around 684 pixels wide, this is so that it will fit within an 800x600 resolution screen without looking too small on a 1024x768 one. The words "Dipsomania Society" (or an amusing take thereupon) should feature somewhere within this banner.
You might also want to include a background image, a box background image, and maybe a mouse-over image. You can even put little swastikas on the top of the boxes, as in the Nazi theme.
2. Learn to write CSS - CSS stands for Cascading Stylesheet. It is useful for changing the style or theme of multiple web pages at once by simply adding a simple relative link within the pages, thereby hugely reducing time needed to redecorate the website. A good set of instructions can be found at www.w3schools.com.
3. Find out what the styles are -
Method 1 - View page source - Go to a page on the website with the aspect you want to change, and view the page source. In Internet Explorer this can be done by clicking View, then Source. The styles to play with are defined by class or ID.
Method 2 - Use an existing stylesheet - This is much easier, but no individual stylesheet uses all the options open to it, so you will probably miss something. The stylesheets are saved within the ../assets/css/ folder.
4. Design the stylesheet - Various software packages are available for web design, including Dreamweaver and Frontpage. However once you know what you're doing you can just use Notepad. To open Notepad click Start, then Run, type "notepad" and hit Enter. Once you have done all necessary fiddle-faddling, ensure that all links within the stylesheet point to its future folder on the site rather than the one on your hard drive, and save the file with the extension .css. Notepad will try to save it as a text file anyway because it was designed by Microsoft and they're annoying like that, so you'll have to change the "save as type" to "all files *.*".
5. Send us it - Compress your stylesheet and all related images within a zip or rar file, and email it to us. Wait.