New WordPress Web Design theme coming soon!

Up until now I had been using a modified an open source Word Press theme. While I love the current design I wanted to make an original WordPress theme for this site. There are several reasons why I wanted to do this.

My daily readers have gone up almost 380%. I have been carefully tracking readership and it seems like I am getting a lot more readers that are coming back. My bounce rate is still a bit higher then I would like.

One of the things that a few of you have commented on is that the “reading” area needs to be a bit wider. It seem like most of you viewing the website are using widescreen monitors. This will also help when I create programming posts.

Another item I want to address is the use of my category menu. The clicks through it aren’t nearly as high as I would like. In the new design I designed the sidebar to be dynamic as well as to promote the other sections of the website by drawing the reader’s eye to it. Only time will tell if this works out.

One of the things I really wanted to change is the layout of the theme. While the them won’t look that much different in the web browser I am coding it so that the post is an <h1> unit instead of <h2>. I am also moving the content of the post very near the top of the page so that I can squeeze as much SEO juice as I can out of the page.

What else is changing?

Well for starters the width is going to be 1000px for the whole design. I find that this is a nice wide view but also works for people using monitor still at the 1024×768 mode. The colors are changing but not by very much. I have tried making the website look a bit more 3D’ish by using gradients.

When is the design going to be ready?

It will be done when it is done. I am on my second version of the design already hence why it is taking so long. I am much happier with this version then with the first. This version I have completed the whole design in Photoshop, I’ve cropped all the section I need and now is the fun part! I just need to code the thing in PHP, HTML and CSS.

Again I want to say I am sorry for not posting nearly as much in the last while. I have been busy with my day job, just came back from a trip from Minnesota and doing a bunch of renovation on our house.

Let me know if there are any thing you would want me to change in the design.