There is some interesting news to share with you today regarding Thesis Theme and WordPress, I have successfully upgraded the blog to the latest version of WordPress and also upgraded our blog theme to Thesis 1.8, I must say that this is a step I wanted to take since long time back, but I didn’t have the heart to do it while running our blogging contest, I mean who need to suffer and have hard times facing website problems at a serous time, and you all know that upgrading your CMS could break the site, and this is not a good thing because my fellow bloggers was expecting the blog up and running 24/7.
Anyways, this is not the only thing I wanted to share with you guys, I am so very excited because I finally could upgraded our Thesis Skin as well, maybe some of you will never notice the differences, but there are some major and minor changes.
Why I updated FB Skin?
First of all, you know that I have designed this Thesis Skin a few months back, and I am always looking into more development to enhance the performance of our blog, and also make it more comfort for our contributors by giving them more exposure.
So, I was thinking how to highlight our bloggers, and add their links allover the blog, and one main challenge was how to place more articles on the home page without forcing visitors and readers to scroll the page down to much.
Also another thing, I was planning to remove a few unnecessary WordPress plugins after upgrading to WordPress 3.0.x and Thesis Theme to 1.8, and instead of using these plugins I wanted to add some working PHP codes manually in a try to speed up the page load if our blog.
I am going to list some of the changes -in points- I have made so you can get the whole idea!
What’s New on FB?
- Reduce empty spaces on the header
- Added a widget for banners at the header
- Google search (better results)
- Display more articles at Home page
- Added “Nice read” to sidebar at home page
- Added Google AdSense to posts
- New related posts plus images after post
- Reduce width of sidebar
- Added “Great Pens” to posts on sidebar
- Added a widget for banners at the footer
- Added “Our Contributors” to footer
What you think about the new look?
I got some feedback on Twitter yesterday, some of my friends says they like it, and some others says the new layout is not appealing to them, and I reply -to myself- work on the blog never ends!
Plz, take a look around, I would appreciate your thoughts!