A New Theme For A New Year

What a busy month it has been so far! I’ve been spending most of my time behind the scenes here at MAMD working on my new theme. It’s one of the premium magazine themes designed by Brian Gardner. His Revolution series caught my eye not too long ago and comes in four flavors: News, Sports, Technology, and Magazine. The theme I chose is the News theme. I’m pretty excited about this next level I’ve taken my blog to and I hope you feel the same.

Brian’s skills really shine through in this series of themes. All are well-thought out and include many features. Seeing the News theme just clicked with the way I wanted to enhance my blog. As you can see, the home page offers me the ability to show excerpts from quite a few posts in different categories all at once. Included on the home page is the collection of tabs at the left. This is something I’ve noticed on other blogs for a while now and I absolutely love this feature. It’s a real space-saver and promotes interactivity. I’ve narrowed it down to two categories, but it has the potential of going to four if I wanted.

The top navigation is built to handle sub-navigational links as well. Currently, my pages (black bar) don’t have child links, but some of the category links (red bar) have them. Most blogs have them everywhere you go (including my previous theme), but these encourage exploration in my opinion.

There’s a main sidebar with two mini ones beneath it. And there’s a breadcrumb added to the top of each page. Another bit of new-ness is the featured video. That area is something of an experiment for me right now as I’m not certain how reliable it will be to have something from YouTube posted there only to have it taken down without notice. But we’ll see. I hope you enjoy it.

To be honest, it took some effort to figure my way around the code, but in retrospect, it wasn’t that bad. It actually helped me learn something more about PHP and CSS. It’s a new way of running a blog and so requires a new way of thinking. Once you have the concept down, you make your posts as you normally would, while keeping an eye on the categories so they fall into the right place on the home page.

While there is a place to refer to for help with understanding how the theme works on his site, I would like to have seen a file included in the download to have everything together. Kudos goes to Brian, though, for making himself available to answer my questions. (I do plan on writing another post where I’ll share what I’ve learned about the inner workings of the News theme so that future users may benefit from it.)

As of this writing, any one of the Revolution themes can be purchased at a reduced rate of $79.95. If you’re looking for a feature-packed and professional looking theme, consider Brian’s designs.

I’m very interested in knowing what you think, so please drop me a comment to give me your opinion.

A big high-five goes out to Kyle and Mike for their assistance.

UPDATE: And another big thanks goes out to Garry for his assistance, too.