The new theme is live!
Earlier this week I wrote that I’d be taking my Thanksgiving vacation to spend a bit of time tweaking the new theme I had found for this blog and then hopefully releasing it before the end of the weekend.
If you are reading this, the new theme has gone live! I’m so excited about this change for A Mike Life and have spent so much time trying to take the old look of the site and try to somehow incorporate it into this new layout.
It’s not the same at all really, it’s very different, but the colors are at least in keeping with the old theme. The only real thing missing is the old rotating header banner. I will miss that, but I think taking that out will result in more attention spent on the actual content of the blog.
Before I say anything else, I have to thank Justin Tadlock and give him MEGA props for this Wordpress theme, which he calls Visionary. The guy is a genius and really broke the mold when he came up with this template. He helped me with a few questions I had and has helped countless others using his themes.
Why is it so great?
Well, for a blog that deals with a lot of daily postings of entertainment and pop culture news, it really helps get that stuff across to you, the reader, easily. There is a lead story and a bunch of capsule blocks of other news items below it. No more scrolling down 10 pages to read all the blogs, you can get a glimpse of nine stories by scrolling once or twice.
The second thing is the jScript tabbed menu on the upper right of the blog. Instead of taking up valuable space in sidebars for latest posts, popular posts, archives and categories, it’s all tucked away neatly into a tabbed navigation area. Awesome. Simply AWESOME.
I also post a lot of YouTube videos and his design had a special section JUST to show the latest videos and to embed them on the frontpage. It’s great because you can watch up to five videos via tabs without leaving the home page. If you want to read more about the video, you can view the entire blog.
Whew. So much stuff packed into this theme. It’s hard to cover it all. Needless to say, Justin really hit the nail on the head with this look and feel and I appreciate everything he did to bring it about. I know others are using it, but I hope I’ve tweaked it enough to give it my own unique feel, even though it’s still using his general layout.
One of the other things you’ll find here is a new logo. It’s nothing exciting, but I did try to make it unique and I thew in a little image in there to show a head on a mic stand, to try and create an identity for this blog. I hope it works. I asked my mother-in-law to look at the logo and tell me what she saw, and she said it was “Mike’s head on a mic stand.”
So if she gets it, everyone else should! I plan on adding a favicon later this weekend, so look for that.
I have done a lot of work to test the new theme out, but there are always those chances that things aren’t quite up to snuff and may not work for everyone. If you see anything wrong, especially if you have IE6, please comment here and let me know. Even if you don’t see anything wrong, let me know what you think and if you have any ideas for improvement.
Below I’ve posted a little graphic to show the new layout and some items of interest on it.
I hope you all enjoy this new feel to A Mike Life as much as I do!
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