I finally got around to giving my site a new and more modern look and feel. As well as the new Glossy Blue theme, I’ve also added a few useful widgets to the sidebar, including a Tag Cloud which shows the more popular categories (or tags) from the site.
If you have any comments, good or bad, please don’t keep them to yourself.
Nice one James though I do miss that lovely photo you had at the top of the old design.
You’re dead right about the photo from the previous theme, it was great shot of the ocean. That theme was called Ocean Mist by Ed Merritt.
However, the version of that theme that I was using did not support sidebar widgets and when I upgraded to the latest version (which does), I found the site very narrow and a lot of my content was running onto multiple lines.
I might revisit this at another time and see if it can’t be widened somewhat.
I really like it James. I do agree with Paul about the photo though.
On foot both your comments, I decided to try integrating the old photo into this theme. Unfortunately, it just didn’t look the same (in fact it looked awful) and I felt I would be doing both themes a disservice.
My best bet would still be to tackle widening the latest version of Ocean Mist.
I think this is a better theme (from what I can remember). I was even considering using it’s “sister”, iTheme, myself. If the photo doesn’t work, it doesn’t work. Maybe keep an eye out for another photo that will.
The “sister” theme you refer to (iTheme) is also a very attractive theme and I really like the drag and drop support in the sidebars. I can’t recall why I didn’t use it instead. I think I first saw the Glossy Blue on the myn95.com site and possibly didn’t take much notice of iTheme when I went to get Glossy Blue for myself.
Of course now that you have pointed out iTheme, it has really caught my eye. They’re both pretty similar in terms of functionality except Glossy Blue includes “Recent Post” and “Recent Comments” at the bottom of the page (but then again, this isn’t that big a deal).
It’s a shame that more themes don’t allow you to have multi-column sidebar widgets. Now that I’m using a wide-screen monitor, I feel like I’ve got loads of unused screen real estate at my disposal but can’t do anything with it (nice problem to have I guess).
So much choice …