« That was not my last post to 21st Century Affiliate Marketing

Site Build It! is changing its name to SBI »

Changing blog themes may have unintentional consequences

August 22, 2010 by John Dilbeck
Filed under: Blogging, WordPress

A couple of days ago, I decided that I wanted my blog themes to be simpler and cleaner, so I switched from the theme I was using on two of my blogs to the one I’m now using on this one and on John Dilbeck And Friends. Currently, I’m using the Revolution Code Blue theme by Brian Gardner. If you’re interested, there’s a link in the footer to the theme.

I decided that I wanted the content in a large left column and the widgets in the right column. Since I put a lot of stuff in the right column (recent posts, recent comments, top commentator, links to affiliate sites, links to other blogs, several RSS feeds, and a few more things), I decided to have two right columns.

I still haven’t decided if I like how it’s set-up yet, or not. I may be changing things in the next few days.

Installing and activating the theme was easy, but then I had to spend a couple of hours adjusting the widgets to where I wanted them and modifying a few of them.

I think blogs are inherently difficult to navigate, so I wanted to make sure I had easy-to-find links to the pages, recent posts, and recent comments. That took only a few moments to set up.

Then, I left to do other things that really needed doing, like resting and taking naps.

In the interim, I was talking to a friend on Facebook about his new blog and how I thought it was hard to navigate. The only way to find other posts was to go to the home page and scroll down.

I wrote and suggested that he add at least the recent posts and comments, especially if he wanted to foster conversations on what he wrote via comments. I also suggested that he have “breadcrumbs” at the top and bottom of his posts that would point to previous and next posts.

Today, I came back and looked at both blogs where I’d changed the theme and noticed that they no longer had the breadcrumb navigation links. That’s when I realized that they were part of the coding of the previous theme I’d been using and it wasn’t included in this one.

So, I did some digging on another blog that still uses the previous theme and found the code to add the breadcrumbs to this and the other blog.

When I did it, it looked horrible. There was overlapping between the navigation links and the Title of the blog post. So, I had to spend some time modifying the CSS code so everything would look okay.

While I was at it, I decided to put the Adsense ads back at the top and bottom of each post. I’ll give it a month or so and see how it produces. If it’s profitable on these blogs, I’ll leave them. If not, poof, they’ll be deleted.

So, while it took only a few minutes to change the theme, it has taken five or six hours of tweaking and adjusting to get it to what I want, and I’ve only seen them in Safari on Macs, so far.

I had some good reasons for changing the themes, but I really didn’t expect it to take this much work to get them back to where I wanted them.

Just as I was about to call it completed for now, I noticed that the new theme was showing all the pages on this blog in a horizontal navigation bar right below the header, and then obscuring most of them. I didn’t like how that looked and I didn’t like that it showed some of the pages that weren’t the most important right below the header.

So, I took a few minutes and removed the code that automatically generated the list of pages and replaced it with hard links to what I consider to be the most important pages that should be shown in that part of the navigation menu. It was easy to do, but I almost didn’t see it.

I wonder what else I haven’t noticed, yet.

Have you had any interesting experiences when changing the theme of your blog(s)? Are you using free or premium themes? Do you have any advice to offer your fellow bloggers?

Act on your dream!

Tags: navigation, themes, widgets

Comments

3 Comments on Changing blog themes may have unintentional consequences

Tweets that mention Changing blog themes may have unintentional consequences : 21st Century Affiliate Marketing -- Topsy.com on Sun, 22nd Aug 2010 1:02 pm

[...] This post was mentioned on Twitter by Pat Marcello, John Dilbeck. John Dilbeck said: New blog post: Changing blog themes may have unintentional consequences http://bit.ly/ahmppK [...]

Brian D. Hawkins on Sun, 22nd Aug 2010 4:22 pm

I did notice at the bottom of the left sidebar where you have the feeds from your other two blogs that the title text is almost the same color as the background instead of white. That’s probably an easy fix with your CSS. Also, some of the links from your recent tweets seem to run over into the right sidebar area, at least in my browser. I’m using the current version of Firefox.

I did notice that your home page tends to go down forever but truthfully you got me looking for fault. lol Otherwise I would have never noticed there were 15 posts on one page. That may hurt your loading time but I didn’t have any trouble. I normally lean toward 10 or less posts and use post excerpts but that’s just a matter of preference.

Those are very small issues. I’m no expert but overall, John, I think the theme is very clean and professional looking. The colors are appealing and the layout is very easy to take in. Navigation seems perfect. You have a ton of content and have done a nice job of navigating it. You have a lot of pages yet didn’t overload your header with all of them yet they can still be found in the sidebar. Most blogs with this much content might seem overwhelming but it works here.

I know you didn’t ask for a whole review but I get carried away sometimes.

John Dilbeck on Sun, 22nd Aug 2010 10:29 pm

Good evening, Brian.

Thank you. I really appreciate your review and a fresh pair of eyes always helps.

You made a good point about the home page going on forever. Not only do I tend to write long posts, but, as you noted, I was showing the fifteen most recent posts. I thought about it for a few milliseconds and agree with you. I’ve changed it to show the last 10 posts and I may reduce that even further in the future.

You are right about the links in the recent tweets running over into the right-most column, so I moved the widget from the center to the larger right column. Thanks. I hadn’t noticed that.

The first thing you mentioned, the links to my sites in the headers of the RSS syndication widgets looked like it would be an easy fix, but isn’t. Not yet.

I debated with myself about how to style the links on this blog. Originally, the theme had underlining turned off and the colors for links, visited links, and hovering over a link were changed to be more aesthetically pleasing.

The problem with that is that many people don’t notice links unless they’re blue and underlined. So, I changed the links to blue and underlined and the visited links to purple (#FF00FF) and underlined. I like the distinction between links I’ve visited and those I haven’t.

I’m giving up a bit in appearance and gaining something in explicitly showing the links so almost everyone will recognize that they are links. I’m not entirely happy with it, but I’ve been on blogs where I had a hard time finding the links and I don’t want that to happen here.

The problem arises that the RSS syndication widget creates a link to the source of the RSS feed and that’s why the titles are almost unreadable over the blue background. If you click the link, then it turns purple and is easy to see, but that doesn’t solve the problem.

The CSS for the RSS syndication widget is handled in a separate file that I haven’t found yet.

For right now, I’m going to leave it as it is, but I’ll be thinking about how to make them more visible. I’m willing to sacrifice ease of reading two links in return for making all the others more obvious.

There has to be a solution to this (making just those links white instead of blue), but I don’t know where to apply it, yet.

I really appreciate your taking the time to critique the new look and for telling me what you thought.

Thanks!

Act on your dream!

Tell me what you're thinking...
and oh, if you want a pic to show with your comment, go get a gravatar!