May Days marked a new design

I’ve recently upgraded my blog to WordPress version 2.71 and did intensive changes to the look and feel. iCouple now portraits a new sleeker, simpler, cleaner, and more elegant Black-White theme, thanks to original free ‘Smoky‘ theme by SkinPress studio.

After one week of full attention to both back-end database and font-end GUI plus plugin-compatibility, I must say I’m satisfied with the new theme, knowing the tables and queries behind running just fine enough.

Let’s start with the summary on factors that contributed to the newly painted house

1. WordPress

While version 2.8 is said to be released within May this year but not rolled out yet, the latest current stable release of WP is 2.71. Full list of new features could be found here. For me, my main concerns includes: dealing with Ultimate Tags Warrior (UTW), managing Comments (support thread comments, paged comments), improvement over Admin page. Fortunately, WP 2.71 did greater job than I expected. The conversion from UTW tags into WP Tag run flawlessly; native thread and paging Comments took a second to setup (right under ‘Discussion’ tab); Admin Panel, Post page are now more user-friendly with real eye-catching AJAX godness. Everything is locked and loaded

I knew some features were already in WP from 2.3, 2.5, 2.6; but as I did one jump from 2.3 to 2.7, I’m very impressed by how much WP grows over time

2. Plugins

The next headache was when I came to think of WP plugins: which one is to keep and which one is to kill? even harder which one is the best for its job? I upgraded almost all of my existing plugins to latest versions, and said goodbye to UTW, Paged Comments, Gallery … as I want to keep iCouple as simple as it should be.

Amongst my used-plugins list, I would say those vital are: Anarchy Media Player (AMP), wordTube, jQuery Lightbox, WordPress Related Posts, and Google XML Sitemap. Some new interesting plugins I would love to add: FeatureMe – the plugin that support sweet flying article’s excerpt cum thumbnail at header, Sociable – allow vistiors to bookmark posts onto social webs, and WP Greet Box – show welcome message to readers depend on which site they come from (nice plugin recommended by my friend). And in fact I’m still trying to find a place to park the Random Quote.

So here I am: backup data, deactives all plugins, do the upgrade then reactive each of them plus few more new ones. ‘The only way to get there is to get there‘, I guess Some tiny changes need to be made on theme templates to suit your own taste though.

3. Smoky theme

If I did not say choosing theme for blog is the hardest part then I must say it now, it’s really the hardest part: Bright vs. Dark theme, Colorful vs. Plain design, Techno vs. Elegant view, Fancy vs. Simple look, Magazine vs. Personal Blog style, Press vs. Porfolio appearance … you name it.

Over hundred of excellent free/premium themes I came accross, many of them stand out of the crowd like Irresistible (by WooTheme), Imagination (by CSSJockey), Notepad Chaos (by EvanEckard), ImpreZZ (by ProductiveDreams), Curious (by WebRevolutionary), BlackPower (by SkinPress), Vector Flower (by EZwpthemes), WordPress Brown (by Dellustrations), Gazette Edition (by WooTheme) … and whole load more. They can be found on the net and all have been named repeatedly on articles about WordPress themes.

For me, painting my house in different colors to my neighbours is more than perfect, and since my neighbours are not using this theme, I picked Smoky. I love the balance between Black and White tone, elegant overview, fixed width, proper ratio between Header – Body – Sidebar – Footer, sound like a good Feng Shui one could have said

I modified the template and CSS on my own preference to make it my new house now.

4. Icons

There’s no doubt customizing website will indeed require small lovely icons. I pay tribute to those creative authors on FamFamFam and IconDock with their ‘web icons’ packages.

I also pull some from my Pixadex Collection. Gosh, I love them all ^^

5. Misc

This part is about the rest of things I can remember right now. It would go with ‘how to organize main page?’, ‘how to select the font type?’, ‘how to write a proper header?’ … If you share that with me, I strongly recommend a visit to Smashing Magazine to appreciate the excellent guidances on blogging and design. Hope that site will inspire you, and inspire you well

6. Test Run

I did my test run for new theme in couple days on my MacBook Pro, in bed, and being offline It was made possible by MAMP software (Macintosh Apache MySQL PHP). MAMP installs a local server environment on Mac OS X, so I could sit back and work in bed giving no thought of Internet connection; and best of all, my old theme’s still out there running before getting replaced by the new one.

My site is tested with above browsers! Just kidding, I haven’t tried all but I’m sure it will run just fine, hope you could tell me

7. Extra stuff

Things kept me going this far, which may or may not have any connection to design ^^

I feel that is it! My new theme is now live, rated G This post is opening for thoughts, and thank you all in advance

Article ends here, perhaps you want to share it!

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