Well you should notice a big change here on the blog, we have a new layout! I’ve had the MistyLook theme on here for way too long. Although it was very functional it was just getting old and when you are looking at the same theme for a long time you get bored of it. Even worse it does not give you motivation to write blog posts. I have been wanting a new blog layout for some time, although I really did not want to pay a lot for it because this blog really does not make any money. It is just a place to talk about what I do and give tips to people who are also running their own business.
Over about a 2 month period I looked for a good theme and could not find one that I liked. My friend Nate from Unique Blog Designs knew I was looking for a design and was nice enough to hook me up with their Personal Blog theme. The actual character in the logo was made by my friend Chris. He does really good work and he charges a lot less than most people.
As you can see I have changed the Personal Blog theme around a bit. The first thing that I had to do was fit my logo in. I thought it would be easy be that whole process took me around 2.5 hours! Next I changed the colors, the green looked nice but I wanted my blog to look unique, so I used blue. I did some more CSS changes then worked on the sidebar. I would say the hardest thing was getting my Flickr stream to go into 3 columns. Overall I like how the theme turned out, although I still need to do some work on it, but I wanted to get it out to give myself more motivation to write blog posts. Also my birthday is next week and I wanted to have the new theme up before that.
Some of the things I still want to do is install some SEO plugins, somehow get brian’s threaded comments to work with this theme, and find out how to replace the Gravatar icons with MyBlogLog ones. If anyone knows how I would really appreciate the help! Please let me know what you think of the new theme and if there is something you think I left out make sure to let me know!
The Contest
Getting the new theme up is a big thing for me so I’ve decided to have a contest. I myself will be giving up prizes but I have also enlisted John Chow and Ian Fernando to give some prizes. I will be announcing the contest next week, but if you would like to get in on the contest let me know by e-mailing me. Any type of contest prize will be appreciated. Stay tuned!