New Theme Lab Design by James McDonald

May 14th, 2008. That was the day of Theme Lab’s last redesign and over one and a half years later, I thought it was time for a change. Just for posterity, here’s a screenshot of the old design.

In this post I’ll go over a few of the changes in the new design, there’s also a video.

Featured Area

At the top of nearly every page of the blog is a new featured area. Here there will be a list of handpicked articles showcasing some of the best content here on Theme Lab. To the right is a theme slider, which lists the 11 latest theme downloads. Hover over each theme to see the name and description.

Tag Pages

With this redesign are also completely redone tag pages. They will list a maximum of 6 themes per page on all the tags with more prominent demo and download links. Click around in the tag cloud in the footer to check those out.

Shout out to Eric Sizemore for the code that separates the theme name and the text after the hyphen in the title.

Threaded Comments

In the old design I used a plugin called Brian’s Threaded Comments to handle the comment threading. This was before 2.7 was released so the comments in the new theme make use of WordPress’ built-in comment threading with room for 3 levels deep of comments.

Also take note of the small green reply link on the bottom right of each comment available for reply.

Other Miscellaneous Changes

• Related post listings on single posts by YARPP
• New social bookmarking icons on each single post page
• A Twitter feed of my three latest tweets in the lower right footer area
• Text display of FeedBurner subscriber count thanks to this code
• Only three posts per page (instead of ten)
• No more trackback or pingback display in the comment area

Video Tour

Also go over a bunch of these in the following video.

The Old Theme

Ever since I launched the old theme (pictured above) over a year ago, I’ve received many compliments and requests for the theme to use on their own blogs. I have decided I will be releasing it in some form or another very soon, although it likely will not be free. Keep your eyes peeled for that.

Conclusion

Like I mentioned in the post title, the design was by James McDonald. You can check out his portfolio at Enthusiastik.

I think he did a great job with it and really captured the grungy and dark look I was going for. Hopefully you like it to, let me know what you think in the brand new comment form.

Also, if you notice any issues or bugs with the new theme, please let me know in the comments. I coded it myself and think I tested it pretty thoroughly, although I could always do with an extra set of eyes.

Related posts:

1. New Video Tutorial – Installing A WordPress Theme
2. Make a Sitemap Page For Your WordPress Blog
3. Looking For Some Feedback On A Video I Made

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