Custom WordPress Theme for SportGeekery.com

SportsGeekery.com is a website I started a few years ago about following sports by way of the web and mobile devices. The site runs on WordPress and uses a custom WordPress Theme I created specifically for SportsGeekey.com. I personally write all the posts and create all the content for the site.

When I started the site several years ago, I used a premium theme from Solostream and customized some of the CSS to fit my needs. It worked quite well for a few years, and it was my first real experience managing a WordPress installation. The site was well past due for a bit of a refresh and having created a few custom WordPress themes, I set out to create another one for SportsGeekery.com.

My top priority for the new site redesign was make the site mobile friendly/responsive. Since SportsGeekery.com generates revenue through advertising, I needed to be sure I had appropriately  handled ads for all viewport sizes. Google now has Responsive Ads as part of it’s Adsense program and using these ads really eased the process.

I had previously created a WordPress theme which I named Simple Catastic, and keeping with that naming convention, I decided to call this one Sporty Catastic. As I did with Simple Catastic, I used the “Underscores” starter theme was used as a template. The home page features three separate queries to display posts based on set categories. The first one displays Online Viewing Guides with a thumbnail, title, and modified date, The second query displays “featured” posts with thumbnails and titles in an inline format, and the third is the typical recent posts that are displayed using the basic WordPress Loop.

The default layout has only the one right sidebar. There are some additional widgetized areas built into the theme which may serve to hold additional ads or other content, but I am not currently using them on the live site. CSS Media Queries are used to set break points based on content rather than any sort of device recognition and the images are responsive.