I’ve introduced a slightly new look to this site with a new theme, one I’ve been experimenting with for the past few months on my tech blog as well as on a copy of this blog I run on my desktop PC with Wampserver 2.
The new theme is Thesis, one of the new breed of WordPress premium themes that offer you a great deal more than simply a collection of PHP and CSS files (I wrote about Thesis when I first acquired it).
While the new look is arguably mostly about what I like, I did do a little bit of ad hoc testing by asking a handful of people what they thought of this new look versus the old look.
Luckily, it seems that everyone likes the new look. (You won’t see it if you read this blog via an RSS or email subscription; if you’d like to see it, head on over.)
One of the reasons why I’ve made the change/refresh is that I felt the old look was getting a bit stale after 14 months of use. Plus the sidebars had far too much distracting bling, even to my eye.
I wanted something fresher, with more white space and with a clear visual focus on the primary content – the posts – in a theme that I could comfortably manage without having to dive in to the templates to edit PHP code, or grapple with CSS, every time I wanted to change an appearance setting.
And I wanted all that without having to do a completely new design.
About two weeks ago, I twittered that I was looking for a designer who might be willing to do some design work in exchange for an equivalent amount of my time. This was all to do with this refresh idea where I thought I wanted someone to redesign the header image you see at the top of the page.
Quite a few people responded to that tweet, among them Panos Kontopoulos in Athens. Panos was terrific, involving his design colleagues in quickly suggesting some new ideas for the blog.
While I didn’t use any of them directly, they did influence my thinking to go ahead and complete this design refresh.
So, the refresh is here. I’m still working through some content changes which I hope to complete in the next few days.
If you have an opinion, I’d love to know what you think.
{ 6 comments… read them below or add one }
Popped out the RSS reader to come and check it out, looks fresh indeed. Nice work Neville. Maybe make the typo in the comment box a bit bigger if you can, it’s rather small what I’m typing here
- Kris
Kris, thanks for dropping in!
Agree, the text is far too small in the c omment-typing box. I’ll have to dive in to the CSS to fix that, I think.
Hi Neville,
I like the new theme too. I agree with you and Kris, the font size here in the comment box is small, but I like the clean look.
Thanks Dave. Fixing the font size in the comments box is on the to-do list along with fixing double gravatars and a drop-down list of pages.
Very nice look Neville! It’ nice to have a change now and again.
Thanks Dave, appreciate it.