Finally - My New Theme
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Some things you may notice:
1.) Under the header are links into what I consider to be my best articles, one of the problems with blogs is that often the best posts get buried in the archives.
These links also provide new uses with a way to quickly get a feel for what the site is about; which was one of the major complaints about my old them.
But then I realized that there are often benefits of working beyond your comfort zones, so I decided to accept his concept and run with it.
2.) The bloody big picture of me was Sean’s (the guy who coded and designed the theme for me) idea. My first response was OMG NO! But then I realized that there are often benefits of working beyond your comfort zones, so I decided to accept his concept and run with it.
We’ll see if I can learn to live with it, or one day you arrive to big blue hole where Jon used to be.
3.) I’ll likely be tweaking for the next little while, but please let me know if you see anything that looks broken…with the exception of the page links being a little bit out of alignment in IE7. Sean’s working on a fix, but really you should get a real browser and make your life a lot better all around.
4.) My nifty magazine-style pull-quotes. I borrowed the concept from Chris Pearson’s Cutline theme; and I think they make a post look so much more professional and increase scanability at the same time.
Thanks a lot to Sean for the cool design and to all the readers who provided feedback and helped when I was trying to figure out what to put into the design. I actually has a few pretty nifty features that I managed to dream up and Sean managed to figure out how to implement.
If you have any comments or questions I’d love to hear them!
Jon
Nice theme, very plain and not distracting.
I absolutely LOVE the magazine-style pull-quotes. It’s like an executive summary of the post. Very nice.
I like the best of listing too at the top.
The big pic of yourself? Well, it’ll increase your personal branding. Honestly as a frequent reader, I likely won’t notice it in a week or two.
Jon,
Love the theme man!
Just a heads up, in case you don’t know. The magazine style quotes are a little messed up in the feed (using bloglines anyway).
I love them in the site though!
RE: “The Pic” - I will echo Kimber and think branding is key too!
See Jon, your readers like the picture of you… it’s all about the branding.
The related posts thing at the top has boarders wider than the rest of the post column (in firefox). It also thinks I searched to find you when I really came from google reader.
I like the quote in the text. Is it just a blockquote installed manually, or is there some automation?
Thanks Brian, I’ll have a look at that. As for the Google reader thing, that’s a known bug with that plugin. I’m not sure why the author doesn’t fix it, because it’s been like that for a long time.
The pullquotes, are just done by having a special CSS style. I need to do a regular blockquote and then add class=”right” or class=”left” and voila! Of couse Sean had to code up some custom styles to do the work. You can view my stylesheet if you’d like to see them.
@Tyler. The Pullquotes just show up as blockquotes in Bloglines…so when you see something weird in Bloglines, you’ll know that’s your que to come and visit my site so you can see it in full splender
Love the new theme! I know I’m a bit late to the party, but I scrolled until I found where you made the announcement. The pull-quotes are fantastice. I was wondering the whole time, “how’d he do that”? As one of your guest bloggers said, WP setup is addictive.
Cheers,
Nneka
Nice layout and easy to navagate. Great job.