New theme for the website..

Theme change with success.

Since last week end I wanted changed theme for my website.  It was almost a disaster, with day and a half of complete blackout. Because of the new theme, which needed some tweeks to work properly on their host. Fortunately those guys at Hostcolor saved me a from full reinstall and recovery, since they managed to recover and put me back on line..-:)

For example, I was doing some experiments last year with a magazine themes which are very popular. I tested few of them on my other blog about Solar Energy and finally went back to my last year’s favorite theme – Lightbreaker.

As some of the Top bloggers had already done in few last weeks (Duncan, Jason, Hany…), me too I felt that the change has to be done. But I did not want to just change for change. I had some criteria that I wanted to improve:

• Better user experience by using more images with Fancy auto-thumbnails – those get created automaticaly without using custom fields in WordPress. It works also for old posts, so I do not have to recreate all my thumbs from scratch… -:)
• More content on the front page, since on the Lightbreaker theme there are only the latest posts directly available.
• Readability – text to read, and the background of pages had to be comfortable by the reader, since I’m maintaining and writing for this web to share my knowledge.

So for my regular users who are using their free RSS reader from Google for example, there will be no changeto read the new articles, but for a new readers which are not using RSS yet (they’re missing a lot… -:) wishing to stay updated with the  latest news, they’ll have to watch for a section on right hand side of the website.

There is also some big changes in a Categories section as you can see. I just simplified those categories to the maximum.

The WordPress pages stays on the complete TOP of the page, and I’m scratching my head at the moment since my Sitemap page does not work anymore…. -:(. It’s been managed by Lightbreaker theme, and now it’s gone… C’est la vie….

Block behaviour – This is a functionality build in this theme, I do not really care, but its here. What i’ does, just click on the plus sign and you’ll be able to expand the articles section.

Actually I would prefer having those articles with those little thumbs to be expanded to the maximum when the page is loaded.

But well, I’m not the guy who coded this theme… -:)..

I’m still tweaking a bit the new theme, which is a paid version of the Comfy theme from Deluxethemes.com. If you see that there is something that does not work, just drop me a comment. Thanks.

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