I decided that it was time for a new look. 2008 is going to be a great year, and I have already had some good chats with a couple of guys about some exciting projects ahead.
I searched around the net, and while there are loads of themes out there, I came across a brilliant post from Smashing Magazine, which had 100 Excellent WordPress themes. I browsed through these, and eventually set my heart on WP Premium theme from R.Bhavesh
He released his premium theme as a free theme, which is really great. Setting up and changing over was fairly simple, and the snags I ran into were fairly simple to sort out.
Let me know what you think of my new look, and kick me if I forgot to put anything back :)
8 replies on “New Year = New Look”
I was so thinking of this theme when you asked about a theme with 125×125 blocks in it to use for your blog.
Looks good. ;-)
BTW, I see u already have 2 advertisers – iMod and Affiliate Lounge. They paid or freebies? Just interested. ;-)
Hey Marc, looks good. I love the simplicity. Clean and refreshing.
I don’t like the Google Ads, but that’s a personal thing ;-)
Let’s see if a tech and web geek blog can produce some wine lovers from the ad. Might open up a completely new marketing avenue :-)
I like the new look bud.
Why don’t you square off the tops of the buttons in your top navigation? ie. the top corners won’t be rounded anymore? I think that might look a lot better?
Looks fantastic!
Quick Critique!
1) I like this new layout quite a lot, especially the neutral colors working with the red. However…
http://i9.tinypic.com/8e1pmkp.jpg
You’ve got that overflow there from the archive listing. If there’s a way of converting it into a dropdown box or something, it would flow better. Well actually…
http://i18.tinypic.com/6qbifco.jpg
In Internet Explorer, with all the ads, it looks like it works alright. You’ve still got some white space there though. I guess it’s just because there are less comments on this post. Still, it’s not good to have all that white space. Maybe you could cut down on the archive, and then rearrange some ads and even add some content at the bottom, like a long 400 x 72 (or whatever the dimensions are) banner.
2) The Recent Posts box is useful, but since users would be looking at the front page anyway, it’s a bit redundant. Why would they look at that box instead of just scrolling down? Maybe you could replace it with a recent comments box, or some other content. It might gain new usefulness if you simply increased the number of entries it listed.
bonus) small nitpick, but right now your title is “Marc Forrest.com”, or two separate parts. since the URL is technically MarcForest.com, maybe you should move them together. Then again, the space isnt that big anyway.
In Firefox, I’m getting this little graphical glitch, but not in IE: http://i11.tinypic.com/8b7mk1s.jpg
Thanks for the business! Hope this helps.
http://darkiseasy.blogspot.com
i love this current theme :D
eish! i would love to have the luxury of having time on my hands to redesign my site… this template is sweet!
Thanks for the all comments. If anyone has any ideas or comments to make it look better, please feel free to leave them :)