A New Look for the Blog
For a while now I’ve been pondering a new look for ABW. While I mostly like the current theme, it has a few drawbacks. The problem is that WP.com doesn’t have many themes to choose from and, of the ones I like, each has one big thing wrong with it that serves as dealbreaker. This wouldn’t be too much of a problem if I could customize the CSS, but in order to do so here I’d have to pay, which I wish to avoid.
Anyway, I’ve picked out some styles to try but I’d love to get feedback from readers on how they feel. Stuff like is the text too small or the reading area too narrow or does the whole thing just feel too crowded, etc. Starting later today and switching up every two or three days, I’ll change the theme and put up a post where anyone can comment on it. No matter if you’re a longtime visitor or someone who just discovered the blog, I’d love feedback from everyone.
Also, if you’re a WP.com user and truly love your theme, pimp it here and tell me why. I’ll add it to my list of ones to try (if it isn’t there already).
While this is going on there will still be regular posts and one of the widgets on the sidebar(s) will always be a list of recent comments so you can keep up with ongoing conversations.
This might be a stupid question, but have you tried this site:
http://themes.wordpress.net/
They have thousands of WP themes to choose from.
I like this one ok. It feels very busy, though. My eyes keep getting pulled away from the main text to the pictures & text on the sides.
-E
Matt – on wordpress.com, you can only use the themes they’ve uploaded for you. So unlike if I just loaded WordPress onto my own site, I have to stick with the pre picked ones.
well, i liked the old one but this isn’t bad. andreas themes are generally pretty good functionally, & the ones that have been modified by others are usually quite attractive from what i’ve seen. i used this one on the hubby’s blog. anyway this one is fluid width i’m guessing, which is always good. 2 sidebars, good but better when they’re both on the same side (just my biased opinion though ;-) ). categories moved out of the dropdown, very good. and i feel you on the inability to customize the css w/o paying for it, which is why i went with the hosted version.
B. Medusa – WordPress.com has that other Andreas theme, too, but I don’t like the two sidebars together like that. I just feel like, if you’re going to have two skinny columns, they need to be on either side of a wide one. But I’m biased, too ;) I may give the other Andreas a whirl while I’m switching just to see if it’ll grow on me.
I would consider hosting the blog at my own domain if I didn’t sometimes get high traffic on posts. I don’t want to think about the bandwidth charges I’d’ve been slammed with during the Great Barak Church Post of Doom incident (over 10,000 hits in one day). It’s much safer to stay here where it’s free and they can handle such things.
Yea i like this new look. I think you should also get your own domain.