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How do you like my new suit?

So, back in my 100th post, I mentioned a couple of upcoming surprises here at DCO.  Here’s the first one – a face lift to the overall look of the site.

The theme I had been using on the site as the Revolution theme by Brian Gardner, a very nice basic theme.  While Brian does great work, the theme itself was beginning to look a bit dated, and in fact he no longer offers it.  So a couple weeks ago I started looking around for a new one.  I eventually narrowed down to two “professional” themes (meaning they were not free): the Flexx theme by iThemes, and the Thesis theme by DIY Themes.  Both themes were very clean and modern looking.  More importantly, both themes were designed from the ground up to be flexible, allowing for fairly drastic layout changes to your blog simply by changing some basic settings from your admin panel.

Ultimately though, I happened upon the WP Premium theme by R. Bhavesh, a theme that was just recently made free of charge.  The theme does not offer the flexibility of the other two themes, but I don’t anticipate changing the layout all that much either.  Plus, I like free.  The best part is the layout “out of the box” is very nice.  For any bloggers out there looking for a free theme with a crisp, modern look, I definitely recommend you check this one out.

I did have to make some minor changes though.  So if you don’t feel comfortable making some basic CSS/PHP code changes, then this theme may not be for you. If however, you have access to anyone with basic technical knowledge at work (or access to any child under the age of 17), then they can most likely help you with anything you would need.  In particular, here are the changes I had to make right away (and where I looked for help):

• I had to tweak the E-mail subscription form at the top right hand corner (with help from this post).
• The sidebar by default displays three ad block positions that I had to comment out.
• I re-thought my current widget and information layout in the sidebar given the functions offered by the new template (in particular, taking advantage of the “tabber” box at the top of the sidebar).  I’ll be taking more advantage of the tabber for one of my upcoming surprises.
• This may not be completed by the time you read this, but the only three color schemes in the template are black, red, and brown.  My site was previously branded with a deep blue color scheme, so I need to research some color codes and update the CSS.  Luckily, the theme designer isolated each color scheme in it’s own stylesheet, so once I determine my color scheme it should be a simple copy and replace.
• The theme does not come with CSS support for the default WordPress classes image alignment classes and they had to be added (here’s some simple instructions).

That’s about it.  I did notice that the big orange RSS icon at the top automatically linked to the internal WordPress blog feed and started to change it over to my Feedburner feed, but my feedsmith plugin did it’s job and over-rode it properly.

All in all I really like the new look.  The theme is nice, crisp and I think a lot more readable than the old one.  Look for a couple more surprises over the next week.  I think you’re going to enjoy them.

So, what do you think of the new look?

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