A New Look for 2009
Site redesign is just about complete.
As I blogged last week, I was on the verge of updating my blog to WordPress 2.7 and a new theme. Less than 24 hours passed before I did both. I really couldn’t wait.
The new theme is called iNove. (I’m not sure whether I should pronounce that eye-nove or in-nove. If anyone has a clue about that, please do let me know.) I found it while putting together the exercises for my upcoming Self-Hosting a WordPress 2.7 Blog Essential Training course for Lynda.com and I pretty much fell in love with its simplicity. But what I really liked was the inclusion of an “east” and “west” sidebar, which makes it possible to put categories and tags in two narrow columns, side by side. A tiny bit of CSS tweaking to widen one column while narrowing the other and a bit of WordPress hacking to change the maximum tag cloud font size, and it looked just the way I wanted it to.
For the first time as a WordPress user, I’m making a special effort to utilize widgets for most of my sidebar content. This is a huge change for me, since I normally hand-code all of my sidebars. The good thing about this is that it limits what I can put in a sidebar without installing more plugins. And let’s face it: my old design was simply too busy.
Comments? Observations? Use the comments link or form for this post to share your thoughts and suggestions.
BLog Technicalities, Call Me a Geek
Did you enjoy this post? If so, please comment on it or share a little link love:
Add to Del.icio.us
Technorati This
Digg This
Stumble it!
Tweet This
I think it looks good, although a bit “heavier” than before with the greys and blacks. I’d definitely agree that widgets are the way to go these days, too.
Andy Piper´s last blog post: Marking a milestone
I agree with Andy on this one, and I liked the “width” of the old one, 3 columns… while it was still a very “heavy laden” site with so many topics to go to, I found that I could get to anything within the 1 click theory. I still haven’t done the conversion to a full WordPress based site, but that is coming, I just loaded 2.7, and am deep in the tutorials from many sources. My current site is weak, and needs an update and a lot more content. Now I have to research the Cloud Widget you speak of… LOL. One of the things my friend Eric studies is web trends, like when “wood” came back for backgrounds… ugh, I hated that… but it was the latest and greatest from the European trend setters. I don’t follow suit, and I probably never will. I need to get my arse in gear and get this done… as this currently is my full time job…