Hi everyone. Hope you all had a great New Year’s. Karen and I spent some time over the holidays redesigning the look of the site. For those reading the site in an RSS reader, its business as usual but take a second to check it out in all its glory.
Apart from a slight visual facelift, this was primarily an architecture-focused redesign. We went from 2 columns to 3 and that new, middle, column represents the biggest change. In addition to our weightier feature posts (on the left), we’re going to be providing a steady stream of fresh links in the brand new middle column.
That’s about it. We’re happy with it and we hope you are too. If there’s anything you don’t like or have any additional suggestions, send them along.
For the Wordpressheads out there, we’re using a modified version of the Cleaker theme (it ROCKS) and the following plugins:
- Configurable Tag Cloud – straightforward tag cloud plugin.
- Advanced Tag Entry – gives you easy auto-complete access to your tags as you write posts.
- Akismet – comment spam checker.
- Batch Categories – great resource if you need to make the switch from Categories to Tags or do general Category maintenance.
- Exclude Pages from Navigation – If you have pages on your site you want to be able to address but don’t necessarily want them showing up in the main navigation, this is the plugin for you. I imagine this would help alot should you want to use Wordpress as a simple CMS to manage a relatively flat site.
- Flickr Photo Gallery – Gives you access to your/other’s flickr photostream from the post posting interface. Makes it SUPER easy to drop your photos into your posts. Highly recommend.
- iWPhone – This one will automagically reformat your site for viewing on an iPhone should any of your iPhone-toting cronies want to check out your site on the go.
- QuickPost – Provides a simple yet robust Tumblr-inspired posting bookmarklet that makes it super easy to embed photos, quotes, video, etc.
- ShareThis – Adds that little sharing icon at the end of your posts that makes it easy for your readers to email your posts as well as add them to the social bookmarking sites of your choosing.
- Sideblog – This allows you to designate categories on your site that will show up separately form your main stream. We’re using it to display all of our Fresh Links in the middle column.
- Simple Tags – Good general Tag Management plugin.
- Wordpress Stats – Gives you access to your blog’s stats right from your Dashboard. Nice complement to Google Analytics.
- WPhone – Really neat plugin that gives you access to an iPhone customized version of your Wordpress interface.
Hope you’re able to find some of these helpful. If you know of any that we might like, throw them in the comments!
Thanks!
a+k
