After running my top commenter contest last month I realized how many people though my blog was bare or needed work. Out of my comments I would say 50% where about the design of my blog. I knew the design was not what I wanted but I realized I needed to do something new quick.

I wanted to do some big changes and when I ran a check to see if it was w3 valid it had a lot of errors. After talking to multiple people they told me the changes I wanted to make to my old blog I would be pretty much have to redo the whole blog including starting from scratch with the coding because it would be easier, cheaper, and quicker. After looking at cost and the headaches of modifying my old theme it just made more sense to start from scratch. So after some thinking and looking at lots of other blogs I came up with this. I know it’s a huge layout change but I think it looks good and has more of a web 2.0 feel. I admit I am a sucker for the whole web 2.0ish look.

Some new features of my blog are threaded comments, edit your comment after posting, separate trackbacks from comments, and the use of gravatars. Also they integrated the plug ins into the code so it makes it easier to manage for me.

Please excuse some of the issues though until I get them ironed out. I know the big one is no home button, he he I did not notice that on my test blog and once I went live it was a lot of work to move to the old theme. Also there are a few small details like the footer needs a little work and the sidebar needs a few minor changes. I will have them fixed asap I have already emailed my coder and he is working on fixing them.

I have learned a good lesson from this though. Thoroughly test a theme on a test blog before using it on your actual live blog. Hopefully the changes should be done by this weekend and I will start a fresh next week without design headaches. It has been a lot of work the last few weeks trying to get the design the way I wanted it but I know a design is important and it needed to be done.

I would like to hear what you think about my design. So let me know if it rocks or if it sucks horribly and I need to change it back.

Update: My coder contacted me with some of the changes but there where still some issues. Now the top commenter plug in is broke, related posts plug in is not installed, and threaded comments plug in is not working. It is a lot of headaches but I know when it’s done it will be awesome.

Update #2:  My coder contacted me and most of the issues have been fixed. Now there is a home button (I know it was a big one), threaded comments now works, related posts and top commenter plug ins are working. I think the only thing that is left is the related posts plug in each post. So I should be done soon.

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