Design Changes to my blog
As I was updating my sidebar widgets, I made some design changes to my blog. It did not take too long (hooray CSS!!!) but it’s worth a look.
Robb DeVore’s post regarding Web 2.0 and fresh designs gave me some inspiration to clean my site up.
- Widgets Sidebar perfection - As I mentioned in my previous post regarding how to properly use the widgets sidebar plugin, I cleaned up my sidebar and re-ordered items as they should be. Also, I removed the “Meta” widget. There’s no purpose for it. Feeds are already consolidated through my feedburner plugin at the top, and I can log in manually by typing in wp-admin/ at the end of my URL. The link to wordpress’s website is already at the bottom of all my pages indicated as a partner. No need to take up more space than necessary.
- The box shape models were changed. I created a gradient shape of 1px X 100px that went from #cccccc to #eeeeee, and I embedded that as backgrounds for the side <ul> tags, as well as my .post class boxes. Each post now starts with the gradiation effect starting from the top, and same with the boxes. This accomplished three things : it provided more consistency with my top banner; it segregated the boxes/posts more effectively and cleanly; it emphasizes the title of each box/post bettter.
- … I know that usually people expect 3 in a list (I don’t know why - the genie has 3 wishes, hockey has 3 periods), but there is no #3. Those are the two minor (but significant) design changes I made tonight.
I hope this site looks a LOT better than the old one (I hated the old design - just never got around to fixing it but tonight I had some ideas).
For such a simple change, it’s a nice improvement.
Yeah no kidding eh? 20 minutes can go a long way!
I think your side bar looks a lot cleaner! We’re working on the Top Commentator widget, but haven’t been able to get it to work.
What error msgs or whatever do you get?
Remember that because it is PHP code, if you add it from the admin panel it will simply parse as regular text, which means it’ll react like comments once it comes out in HTML.
When you do View Source, you’ll simply see the code :
Use the widget adding mechanism. YOu need to edit your widget.php file under the widgets.. OR. if you don’t have the sidebar widget, simply add it to your sidebar.php file under your templates as generic PHP code.
I see you have a partners widget…what’s the deal with that? How does someone become a partner…is that a consulting work you might have done for them?
Naw that’s just a blogroll thing. You can set categories to your blogroll, and one of them is titled “Partners” and you can put wahtever you want in there!
Ah! Good to know…
Nice post and nice updates
Thanks for the mention. I’m writing a new blog post now (can’t sleep) and I’m mentioning you a couple times in it, so I came to find the exact post I wanted to link to, and I seen this. I got to make sure I read your blog every day. haha