PBF three point oh Is LIVE! And Details on The New Design, Too

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After two weeks of back breaking work and finger crunching work from 9 to 5 everyday,  I’ve redesigned the WHOLE of the PuttingBlogsFirst blog, and ain’t it fantastic? Wow.

So, let’s get into the details of what I’ve done to this blog.

Overall

Firstly, I’ve not liked the reverse chronological display of posts that WordPress gives, as that is not a good way of being user friendly.  The usual ‘reverse chronological order’ concept doesn’t do much good to new visitors who come to your blog. What you need is to show them your best content, and that’s not very much achievable with the usual layout.

So, I decided to give this blog a magazine style look, which also seems to the fad in WordPress theme design, currently.  What you’ll see on the homepage of this blog is the very latest post at the very top of the content area, followed by a list of the older posts. I’ll probably replace that older posts’ list with a popular or ‘featured posts’ list, if it doesn’t work out well for this blog’s readers.

Design Details

Moreover, I’ve made this design more minimalist and simplistic than the previous design, (the previous one was simple too, though) . I’ve also tried, as far as possible, to follow standards. For example, I’ve made the effort to make this design XHTML 1.0 and CSS 1.0 compliant. More over, keeping with usability traditions, the colors of links are a shade of blue, underlined when hovered upon.

The use of shades of black should be prominent in this new design. The headings, text colour and other things are coloured in a shade of black, or dark gray, displayed over white background, providing good contrast, and therefore a great reading experience.

Also, there’s a lot more white(or negative) space around the text and headings, providing for a pleasant reading experience.

Comments

I’ve revamped the comments section too, making it a tad more cleaner than the one in the previous design(that one was pretty clean too, by the way). Owing to WordPress 2.5’s built in Gravatar support, I easily included gravatars in the comments by using some simple PHP one-liner.

SEO

I’ve done A LOT with this new design with respect to SEO. Firstly, each page has one and only level one heading, and that too the post’s headline. On the main page though, I’ve made the latest post headline a level one heading.

Moreover, I’ve used h3 or h4 tags for the sidebar headings, for they’re not as important as the main content itself, SEO wise. The headlines of posts on single pages are level 1 headings, and then level two and three and so on are used to structure the content

Problems?

I’ve gone through the design a zillion times, finding and correcting typos and problems. However, I’m quite human and can and probably do have missed a few problems on the way. So, if you encounter any problem, feel free to tell me about it or you can use the all new problem reporting feature I’ve enabled on all pages of the site, in the footer.

And oh, please do tell me how you like the new theme, and any suggestions or complaints are welcome!

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