Filed under News, Webdesign
Had some extra free time today so decided to work some more on improving(hopefully it’s improving) the blog. Most noticeable changes are probably those on the front page. The way that the categories are now setup in a “tag cloud”, I always thought that the old way of showing them one per line took up too much space, and looked very boring as well. So I changed it to a “tag cloud”, which basically is a list of all categories thrown together in one pot. The bigger the text is, the more entries in that category there are.
Secondly I removed the top google adsense ads, and I’m thinking about some new placements for the ads anyway, seeing that they basically being in maybe six clicks per month anyway, and that just isn’t worth of having them here in the first place. Will probably decide on this over the next few days, was maybe thinking about having one of those 460×80 blocks after the first blog post. Any suggestions?
Thirdly, you can now subscribe to receive email notifications of any comments that have been posted in any of the entries that you have subscribed for. So if you want to find out about any follow up replies, just tick the small check box under the text area, and you’ll receive an email as soon as a comment is posted after yours.
Welcome to part two of my sort of rant about the new style/look of Popomundo. For most parts it would seem that the developers cleaned up the major nuisances about which I posted a few days back. Mainly the navigation, which has now received a background so that it isn’t any more painful to look at. It could however use some better(read: more) spacing between the links.
The main annoyance still remains though. Even though I’m willing to bet that the artist who made these probably put in a lot of time in making these, and some of them are really great. The most of them are just horrible, not from design point of view, but from the idea behind it. Each city in Popomundo has its own banner, and the one above is for Amsterdam. These banners are supposed to represent each city. And sadly most of the city banners are just wrong, at best heavy handed on stereotyping. I wish that more thought had been put into these, because the effort that was put into the drawings themselves is great.
Having said that, the new style with the new fixes had been growing on me slowly. I really like the expanded areas for user images. But there’s still more that could be done to improve it. Quite a few large bits of wasted empty space in the middle of the design, and not enough separation of content so it clashes with each other.
And I’m not even going to say anything about the HTML/CSS(or lack thereof), because that’s one major mess up they made. I mean how can you spend so much time on making a design for the new decade and completely forget about bringing the code up to standards as well?
Just yesterday the latest version of Burning Board 3 Beta was released by Woltlab. Beta 3 brings us a new “Help System”, finalisation of language packs, upgrading options, feature improvements and bug fixes. The new beta version has hopefully improved on the installer as well, as I’ve been having nightmares from the Beta 2 installer already.
You can download the free(it will become a pay to use script once it leaves beta stages, so hurry!) beta version from Woltlab’s Beta Download page.
In semi related news, I have started using my wBB2 license once again, so watch this blog to find out what exactly I’ve done with it. Soon(tm).
Everyday hundreds of new blogs are launched, and sadly most of them just stick to the default theme and only change the name. So what we end up with is, thousands of blogs that look the same. And while the default WordPress theme is quality and well designed it has become a turn off for me when I look at new blogs.
So for those of you out there who are thinking about starting a new blog, I suggest you head over to Smashing Magazine and check out the list of “83 Beautiful WordPress Themes You (Probably) Haven’t Seen”. It’s a great list, with a lot of cool themes, so kudos to the guys for compiling that list.
With some simple changes, additions, such as custom header, you can personalise the themes to look really great and most of all unique.