Uncovering the New Blog Look

After ranting about the free WordPress themes for more than a year, I finally decided to take the plunge and get myself the CSS upgrade. This was a difficult decision for me because I’m only a basic user of CSS, but after experimenting with the “Preview” function in another blog, I did start feeling more confident about my coding abilities.

This design is based on the CSS skin called Baubles. Most of the CSS skins that are free and ready to download (for WordPress.com) are based on either the Sandbox/Sandbox-10 or the K2-Lite theme. It’s important to know that there are many many WordPress themes available for download…but 98% of them are only available for WordPress.org users.

Some of the major changes made by me:

1. Wide, 3 column look- Most of the three column themes at WordPress suck, except for maybe Digg-3, which is one of the most widely used themes here. So, this was a conscious decision to be different and try to incorporate all the good things in the same theme.

2. Footer- I added a strip of picture to my footer and tried to spice it up.

3. I’ve personalized the background color for comments made by the blog author.

4. Those of you who are WordPress users can probably see the new, green color for the navigation bar! I can also make it disappear with a piece of code

5. Also made a small signature using GIMP. I plan to use it for all my posts henceforth.

Problems with the Theme-

1. I removed the Blog Header and Description from the style sheet and added the blog header image, which is no longer click-able. There is a new widget in my Presentation tab that adds the Home Page link though.

2. I don’t like the border around some images in my sidebar. I need to find a way to remove them.

6. You must have noticed the small leafy, images in the sidebar and at the beginning of each blog title. I made them using GIMP, Irfanview and some free images that I downloaded from the internet. Those of you who have the upgrade or just want to learn CSS anyway, should download the Firefox add-on called CSS Viewer, that lets a user view the detailed CSS of any blog/website. It’s a great tool if you want to try to replicate the style of some other blog/website.

I also really like the Diurnal skin by the same designer. I plan to use it next (whenever I make the theme change, that is). My question for you is- Do you like the new look? Any suggestions?