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After resisting for more than a year, I finally gave in and changed my theme last night. The previous one had served me well and I persisted with it primarily due to several customizations I had made. But it was getting too clunky and boring. And I wasn’t blogging regularly so why not tinker around in the backend? Since I’m not PHP or CSS guru, I’ve to rely on one of those free themes that are available out there. This theme is designed by Abhijit Nadgauda of iface thoughts. I had downloaded the theme when Abhijit had released it more than a year ago and in spite of looking for other designs, I couldn’t find anything better than this one. I’ve been a sucker for minimalism but at the same time I’ve to try hard to avoid the bells and whistles that come with every new feature that is released continuously for WordPress. However, there is no theme that I can use directly out of the box and usually have to customize it heavily to suit my preferences and tastes. Fortunately, Abhijit’s theme was plain and perfect for such customization. For those who are interested, I’ll just give a rundown of this design’s primary features:
- The front page of this blog is now ad-free and if you read the blog via a RSS reader, you’ll almost never seen any advertising. Apart from Adsense, I’ve stripped off all forms of advertising including the CPM banners from Adbrite, Project Wonderful, Adify, and Ads Daq.
- The front page is modified for Inline Asides with the help of AsideShop plugin as recommended by Aditya. Chetan had helped me code the Asides for my previous theme and this plugin greatly simplifies that process without mucking up the code. Additionally, the front page now features excerpts for full-length posts (except the most recent post) for SEO purposes so you may need an additional click to view the entire post.
- The sidebar features items that are directly related to activities that I would usually blog about. E.g. all pictures I take are uploaded to my Flickr account and the movies I watch are rated and briefly reviewed. I tend to expand some of these in full-length blog posts. I’m trying to find a comparable Book Review plugin but the one that is closest to the movie review one somehow doesn’t work.
- All navigation features like Monthly Archives, Categories, and Recent Comments and Posts are relegated to the bottom section of the blog. In the earlier design, these features occupied nearly the entire sidebar. The Archives and Categories now are enclosed in a dropdown menu to avoid long and clunky lists. The previous theme for some strange reason didn’t process the code for WordPress tags which I extensively use for full-length posts. The tag cloud on the sidebar features the 100 most-frequently used tags. I might have a separate page for the rest of the tags sometime later.
- The Search function in WordPress is a known chink in the armor of an otherwise robust CMS. Fortunately, plugins eliminate any such shortcomings. The Advanced Search feature in the bottom bar allows for ordering of search results by relevance as opposed to chronological order in default WordPress search apart from filtering of search criteria by specifying posts, pages, and comments.
- One of the strengths of this theme design is the ease of enhanced usability. The page links are easily seen and accessible right on top of the page. The earlier theme didn’t do justice to the individual pages especially the new ones like Deli.cio.us Bookmarks The Skip links allow you to jump either to the main content or the bottom bar with a single click. The three RSS options - posts, comments, and email are also easily visible. The wide header space allows me to insert my Twitter status considering I’m quite active on Twitter these days.
- As in Abhijit’s minimalist and resource-saving designs, this theme largely uses text instead of images. Apart from the Flickr photos, DesiPundit button, and images within posts, the design doesn’t use images thus saving on load times.
Well, that’s about it. Let me know if you notice anything amiss. Otherwise any feedback, good or bad, is always welcome. Now that I’ve a new design, I should be blogging more regularly, right?
by Patrix | on Saturday, May 10th, 2008 at 7:55 pm | 
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May 10th, 2008 at 11:55 pm
Love the new theme: uncluttered and easily navigable.
May 11th, 2008 at 10:14 am
Yeah, like the new theme.
And btw, why are readers searching for Vinod Kambli’s wife on your blog?
May 11th, 2008 at 10:57 am
http://www.ipatrix.com/about/ still shows the same old theme. cache?
May 11th, 2008 at 11:06 am
Very nice theme and presentation. The new theme and separation of movie reviews, bookmarks right at the top of the header. I like your minimalist attitude with the attention on visibility for Content. I have been a regular at your blog for quite sometime. Have avidly followed your marriage , cruise and other posts and your blog theme is a major reason why I keep coming back regularly.
May 11th, 2008 at 11:39 am
Bongo, thanks. Glad you approve :)
Confused, well, what can I say? My readers aren’t really interested in my erudite commentary on socioeconomic issues. I’m sure you’ve already checked out the Vinod Kambli wife post so you know why. And to think I’ve filtered out other risque searches which are far more popular.
Thejesh, ain? I see the new theme on all pages. Clear your cache.
Nissidhi Rajesh, I’m glad you delurked even if it was commenting on this new theme. Thanks for reading.
May 11th, 2008 at 12:35 pm
People, are more important than SEO, no?
Can we get rid of the “click here to read more” syndrome please?
May 11th, 2008 at 12:53 pm
Yuvi, Agree but people rarely visit the front page. Those who do so have the most recent full-length post without excerpts (and all Asides posts). Loyal readers have full access through feeds and search visitors arrive at single post pages anyway.
Apart from the SEO reasons, I like to some kind of uniformity on my front page. Ultra long posts which I’m frequently guilty of, dominate the front page and make them unwieldy.
May 11th, 2008 at 6:08 pm
Actually I hadn’t. Checked now.
Kambli dude is sure lucky; the woman’s hot. But then you can also argue that Kambli, despite all his antics, is a former India player. That must count for something.
May 11th, 2008 at 6:55 pm
Nice theme. A definite improvement and remarkably nicer theme than one you had. I am not a big fan of 3 theme with 2 Right sidebars. Somehow too much information gets clobbered on one page - this theme serves the same info in the nicer and more readable way.
I have to change my theme as well - I really need to move to minimalism hehe :)
S
May 13th, 2008 at 6:33 am
This is so much more readable than the previous one. Nice. (It looks even better in Ubuntu.)
May 13th, 2008 at 4:23 pm
Confused, of course! It is a win-win situation. BTW I wonder Kambli must be ruing his early demise from cricket. The Twenty20 format would have worked great for him. Do you know what he is up to lately?
Supremus, I know. I think I’ve managed to overcome the more-sidebars-the-better syndrome. The bottom bar navigational links keeps everyone happy. I look forward to your theme redesign. You do have the minimalist design sense.
Chetan, Thanks a lot. Means a lot coming from you. I would love to see a screenshot from Ubuntu.
May 13th, 2008 at 9:42 pm
[...] Thanks for visiting!Since I’ve been fiddling around at the backend of this blog in midst of revamping the look, I managed to clean up my plugins directory. Although WordPress by itself is a robust blogging [...]
May 13th, 2008 at 10:33 pm
I guess going by the comments I am the only one who found that your earlier theme was much better than this.
Only the content sidebar and the comments layout looks good. The header box (with the title and the navigation menu) looks skewed with respect to the layout of the content pane.
And the footer is more of an optical illusion for me, too many colors on that box especially the “Search this site” pane.
Few things which can definitely be fixed :)
May 14th, 2008 at 2:13 pm
Venu, of course I didn’t expect everyone to agree with the theme change :) I guess your grouse with the header is that the twitter updates and the feed options line are not aligned.
I agree with you regarding the Search this site pane. The grey text can be changed. I’ll get to that soon.
May 15th, 2008 at 9:23 am
Patrix, I don’t intend to be too critical about the theme, but one thing which I immediately didn’t like is the color scheme used in the header and the footer. Its just too difficult to read (the major content is in footer though). If i counted right, there are almost 5 colors in there :)
Also I meant the header -> main content layout (Twitter is fine with me and is aligned nicely to the right)
The highlighted portion in the below image is what I wanted to convey.