Earlier this week I wrote that I’d be taking my Thanksgiving vacation to spend a bit of time tweaking the new theme I had found for this blog and then hopefully releasing it before the end of the weekend.
If you are reading this, the new theme has gone live! I’m so excited about this change for A Mike Life and have spent so much time trying to take the old look of the site and try to somehow incorporate it into this new layout.
It’s not the same at all really, it’s very different, but the colors are at least in keeping with the old theme. The only real thing missing is the old rotating header banner. I will miss that, but I think taking that out will result in more attention spent on the actual content of the blog.
Before I say anything else, I have to thank Justin Tadlock and give him MEGA props for this Wordpress theme, which he calls Visionary. The guy is a genius and really broke the mold when he came up with this template. He helped me with a few questions I had and has helped countless others using his themes.
Why is it so great?
Well, for a blog that deals with a lot of daily postings of entertainment and pop culture news, it really helps get that stuff across to you, the reader, easily. There is a lead story and a bunch of capsule blocks of other news items below it. No more scrolling down 10 pages to read all the blogs, you can get a glimpse of nine stories by scrolling once or twice.
The second thing is the jScript tabbed menu on the upper right of the blog. Instead of taking up valuable space in sidebars for latest posts, popular posts, archives and categories, it’s all tucked away neatly into a tabbed navigation area. Awesome. Simply AWESOME.
I also post a lot of YouTube videos and his design had a special section JUST to show the latest videos and to embed them on the frontpage. It’s great because you can watch up to five videos via tabs without leaving the home page. If you want to read more about the video, you can view the entire blog.
Whew. So much stuff packed into this theme. It’s hard to cover it all. Needless to say, Justin really hit the nail on the head with this look and feel and I appreciate everything he did to bring it about. I know others are using it, but I hope I’ve tweaked it enough to give it my own unique feel, even though it’s still using his general layout.
One of the other things you’ll find here is a new logo. It’s nothing exciting, but I did try to make it unique and I thew in a little image in there to show a head on a mic stand, to try and create an identity for this blog. I hope it works. I asked my mother-in-law to look at the logo and tell me what she saw, and she said it was “Mike’s head on a mic stand.”
So if she gets it, everyone else should! I plan on adding a favicon later this weekend, so look for that.
I have done a lot of work to test the new theme out, but there are always those chances that things aren’t quite up to snuff and may not work for everyone. If you see anything wrong, especially if you have IE6, please comment here and let me know. Even if you don’t see anything wrong, let me know what you think and if you have any ideas for improvement.
Below I’ve posted a little graphic to show the new layout and some items of interest on it.
I hope you all enjoy this new feel to A Mike Life as much as I do!
Dude, it’s really nice. I’ve been planning a redesign for my blog (not till January) and this was one of the themes I have on my short list. I really like what you’ve done with it. I might have to take it off my list now…but it still rocks!
Thanks Jason, sorry to force you to choose something else, because it is such a good theme. Part of me was worried about using it since I have a feeling MANY blogs could try it out.
But maybe there are things from it you can still use. The tabbed menu thing is really the key here…it cleans up the design so much.
A downside of it is that it’s not widgetized at all, it doesn’t work with it too well, so all of it is adding stuff manually. Made things more difficult, but he really has it set up nicely.
Also, I do appreciate your current design and it helped me with mine. I like your “welcome back” plugin with the MyBlogLog avatar stuff and I pretty much stole that from you
LOL…I don’t remember where I got the “welcome back” plugin from but I probably saw it on another blog and stole it from them…
It almost makes me sad to see the tabbed menu because I spent countless hours figuring out how to do that exact same thing for someone this past summer. It was killer and it took freakin forever (I’m not exactly a programmer). I never did incorporate it into my blog but maybe I should have as I would have been cutting edge.
I have already seen this theme on a couple of sites but this is, by far, the best implementation of it that I’ve seen. Some people have a good sense of style and taste and what works and doesn’t and others…well, don’t.
I’m not sure I will want to use a theme that requires a lot of manual additions or changes. I blog at infrequent times so I like to be able to just write and post and be done without too much fuss. We’ll see, I guess.
This one does make it a bit harder. Having pictures, for instance…I pretty much have to add a 275×175 image if it’s going to be a Featured story, and all of them usually should have a 75×75 to look good on the frontpage capsules. So that is kind of a pain, but I think it’s worth it…for now.
It looks great Mike! Makes me want to redo mine….sort of…but not right now.
I started using Visionary at OpTempo last week. I agree with your comments. It’s good if you follow the script but it gets a bit tedious if you want to customize. Plus, having to add graphics makes it trickier to do.
I’m probably going to do some additional mods to get a slightly different look because I think a lot of people are going to jump on this one.
I like what you’ve done with it Mike, and I hope all the manual labor isn’t too tough on you.
This is definitely the best use of any of the themes I’ve created yet. It amazes me how you’ve taken the layout and really made it your own.
Frank – I’m glad I didn’t see you switch themes before I put this one up, or maybe I’d felt bad about doing it
I hope it doesn’t become THE theme that most blogs use after awhile, but it is pretty nice…so I can’t blame them.
Justin,
Thanks for the props, I appreciate it. It’s still your theme, but it just has the look and feel of my old site in a way.
Thanks for it again, you really did a great job.
[...] The new theme is live! [...]