Nov

Give Your Blog A Facelift

Written by Neil Galloway

I released my new look for the Thoughts From My Life the other day and I have to say I think it looks awesome.

I am not done all the features that I want to put in, but I thought it would be best to just roll out the layout and fix what I came across later. It looks pretty good so far I must say. Some of the changes I have done are:

New Colors

I wanted to make it look a bit snappier. The color is more brownish, but it looks more professional and clean then the old one.

New CSS Layout

I found a design on Open Source Web Design. This design was by Arcsin. I modified it quite a bit, but the original one was by him.

I used CSS as much as possible. It is supposed to improve your search engine optimization (SEO) by removing more of the display data to the CSS file and leaving the actual content in the html page.

Menu Bar Moved to the Right Side

Most blogs seem to do this anyways. The article headlines and content grab your eye a bit more when the menu options are on the other side. It also promoted the actual article content closer to the top of the page.

Category/Archives Have Totals Now

I always liked this option on blogs so you could see how many articles on in each category.

HTML Is More Valid

I took the time to get rid of most of the parsing errors so that the pages being served are more valid and easier for search engines to read.

What Did The Old Site Look Like

Here is a screenshot of the old site.

More Changes Coming

I am going to be doing further improvements in the near future. Some you can expect are:

Improved HTML validity.
A new ad revenue source.
Frequent commenters list.
Recent articles list.
Recent commenters section that includes linkbacks.

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Category: Blogging

Original Post: Monday, November 12th, 2007

2 Comments

Anonymous Says:
2007-11-12 10:37:00
Nice look. Way snappier then the old design.

James Birchall Says:
2007-11-12 10:37:50
I like the new look. It's way snappier to load then the old site. Way to go man.