work begins on my new theme

Posted by: Sean | Posted on: May 25th, 2010 | 0 Comments

I have finally begun working on my new theme for this blog, if you were on my blog last Saturday night around 2am you may have seen the early version of the new theme. I activated it temporarily just so I could see how images on my blog post would be affected and a few other parts that I want to change in it. I bought the theme from ThemeForest, I have bought themes from that site before, and they are good quality so I don’t mind paying a bit for them. Now though I am in the process of setting up wordpress on another domain so I can edit the new theme without it affecting anyone who is visiting my blog because when I am editing I might break something when I am adding things into the theme!

 

The theme itself is very different from my current theme; it is in fact completely different in terms of colours. This current theme is dark, and the content seems very squashed. In my new theme the colours are much brighter and there is a lot more space for the content, the blog itself will be much wider in width and should be very lightweight which will help boost the blogs load speed. I am undecided if I will be keeping my current logo for this blog, it looks great but I am not sure if it will suit the new theme, and I think it is about time I got a new one. The current logo is made by LogoNerds, I am not sure how much I paid for it when I got it, it wasn't a lot, so I might try and either make my own new one or get another one made. When I put out my new theme I am going to update my list of bloggers in the sidebar, there is a few blogs I have started to read lately so I think I should add some new links, to show some support :D.

New Theme Live

Posted by: Sean | Posted on: April 8th, 2009 | 2 Comments

Finally after over a month of me saying that i would be getting my new theme completed, the time has finally arrived. Today i added the new theme to the site.I have also incorporated a new section 'Photos' which links to my Flickr account, and pulls in all my photos.

On the right hand side i have an updated method of displaying my latest tweets and below the search bar is a link to the main social sites that i use.

In the footer of the theme i have a tag cloud which lists the most popular posts in my blog. Also it shows my latest blog posts and the most popular blog posts. When viewing my posts on there own individual page there is an option to share the post across multiple sites including stumbleupon, twitter and digg. Also below the posts it shows a list of related posts which may interest you, such as another post talking about the same topic that you are currently reading.

Finally i have a new great looking logo. I paid to have this logo designed and i think it was well worth the money. It cost me about €20 from logonerds. I am really happy on how it turned out and they really do include exactly what you want. And they seem to have taken the Irish part of my site to the extreme with the shamrocks, i like them though they look great.

New Theme Goes Live Tomorrow

Posted by: Sean | Posted on: April 7th, 2009 | 0 Comments

Tomorrow i will finally be putting up my new theme. It has been a long time since i first said that i was going to change the appearence of this site. But now it is finally going to happen. Tomorrow morning i will begin to make changes throughout the site, such as removing any unnecessary plugins that i have, i have a lot that are not enabled so it would be useless to keep them.

I have always meant to get around to doing this and the way i see it is why not make the launch of my new theme the time to do it. I might also install wp-supercache, that might help with page-load speed, depends if it agrees with the site, if it stops anything from working then it will not be added.

The site may end up crashing tomorrow for a short while due to the current theme requiring the plugins i will be disabling. I might just put the site into Maintenance-Mode for a short while tomorrow while i get things sorted. The new theme is a complete do-over, it will hopefully reflect more about my personal life, that is after all what a blog should be doing and since i have decided to put more time into this blog i want to start fresh with  a new template.