Yes, in what has been a soft launch, I have launched a new template! I wasn’t completely happy with it, and about a week after began designing another theme.
However, a week or so of work, I too was unhappy with that theme. What you see now is the compromise between the two.
A few new features. One of which is actaully my first wordpress plugin I’ll be releasing in a couple of weeks:-
JQuery-ise The Site
My latest thing I’ve tried to get half decent at is JQuery & Javascript, and it shows on this site. I’m putting in a couple of Javascripts (the tabs down the side, and the hover effect under the icons) to see if they work, and work they do!
Boombox!
Couldn’t think of a name for this, but this is going to be my first WordPress Plugin, it’s a method of inserting a small box in the header of the page, to advertise important things (such as the bbPress Plugins 0n the top of the page now). I’ve got a better idea with what to put there, but that will come later!
Problems
One thing I have been unable to do is integrate Tweetbacks to the blog, they’re not displaying. Any suggestions as to why this is?
Anything Else?
Well it would of been a soft launch yesterday, but I got stumbled quite heavily (too heavily for a time, I forgot to re-switch-on the wp-cache, slowing down the site immensely), but there didn’t seem any problems. Do you see any? What do you think of the layout? Any problems?
Tags: SEO, themes, Web Design, wordpress, wordpress plugins | Comments: 8 Comments
Rhys Wynne, the author of this blog, is a 20 something web designer from Colwyn Bay. 
I like the header. You could add some variety by making a couple more images and displaying one at random.
Experimenting with jQuery sounds like a good idea. I’ve been using it in Injader, haven’t done much with it yet but what little I have done has worked out quite nicely.
I just placed some ads on your site via CMF Ads. I noticed that my last ad did quite well, so I might as well run some more ads
@Ben: if you reload a couple of times you should see more pictures. Thanks for the further ads! I’m going to advertise myself on there soon
i like it… the top especially. i like the modern fresh look its got, but isnt so different from the old one that you wouldnt recognise it (apart from the name obv, the welsh colours are stil there.
LOVE the idea with having different pics at the top everytime. but would be cool to have a slow scroll tho? without refreshing the page?
i have no idea what bbpress is… but that box at the top (‘boombox’?)… you use that to basically draw attention to stuff? i like… its eye catching. but… the more u move down the page the more writing there is… you’ve got boxes and headings to sort things which is good but i dunno… still think they all look v simelar. hope u dont mind me saying.
but i defo like this new look… its my fav so far!
I like it! Nice design. Although the first place my eyes went is the big bbPress area, which confused me since this isn’t a forum!
Maybe a bit too many sidebar widgets though, with the sidebar being longer than most pages’ content.
Looking goood!
The bbpress box isn’t big enough for the text the last line is resting on the bottoms – its really niggling at me!!
It would be cool if instead of showing a random image it showed a slider!
http://cssglobe.com/post/3783/jquery-plugin-easy-image-or-content-slider
whaddyathink?
@Han Yes. Carly said the same. It’s a mac firefox issue. I’m 80/20-ing it, so get a PC
I am not a big fan of sliders, especially for such uncritical elements such as the header image. It’ll draw attention to it, which I don’t particularly want to.
Nevertheless, you’ve found something I actually want to use for another site, so cheers
@Dan I quite agree regarding the sidebar. After speaking to James (JDesign – he’s a mate of mine with a much better design mind than me!) I can think of 3 or 4 boxes to eliminate, merge or sort out, will do so later on tonight.
I’m also going to rename the bbPress box “bbPress plugins”.
@becky Glad you like it! You’ve given me an idea about your gravatar (unrelated to what you’ve said.) – will sort it out later
The header is very well designed. It is attractive as well. Except maybe if the text to the right could be reduced by a line and have the resulting space space the text out by a bit.
You’ve got a very informative blog going.
Stumbled across your blog and I think it looks great. You’ve done a good job with subtle variations in bg color to segment your theme. You’ve got a lot going on in the sidebar but it’s very easy to navigate and make sense of. Well done.