During the last week I’ve progressively updated AlphaHutte’s look & feel. I’ve tried to make it as clean and minimal as possible: few captions, no graphics, extremely simple typography, black and white. The idea is to bring the focus on the actual content and above all emphasize photos (now the only colored content of the site). For that matter, the new layout accommodates both text and photo posts: something of an hybrid between a traditional blog and a photoblog.

Under the hood, together with the latest release of Wordpress, is a new theme I coded almost from scratch. I’ve called it WhiteShadow and it’s inspired by a long list of minimalistic Wordpress themes and photoblogs. It’s made of only 10 files, supports widgets and has been tested on IE, Firefox and Safari. The new release also makes use of Keith Salomon’s Configurable Tag Cloud and Giuseppe Argento’s Slimbox plugins. The second is perfect with Wordpress’ new gallery feature (after the small documented fix) and I use it for in-post galleries; AlphaHutte’s main galleries still use Felix Turner’s great SimpleViewer.

The minimalistic look might have been induced by my recent move to the Mac (after a life spent on PCs!). But this is something for another post…