New WordPress 2.0 Theme – See What’s New

Update:  I had to pull this theme as it was killing my server.  Old one back in place for now.
I’ve only had this blog for three weeks and already I’m on my second theme, but I think this one is hear to stay as I think it is pretty unique and looks very clean. My site is now a based on the Durable theme that won the last WordPress 2.0 Theme competition, with a lot of extra bells & whistles added on.
I’ve gone for the Durable theme as I think it suits the way many users actually use my site. I think it’s a common mistake of most blog designs that they place too much emphasis on the listing of articles by post date, even though 90% of their visitors come via search engines and bypass those pages altogether.

Here’s a list of the new items available on Connected Internet:

• On the fly color scheme editing for you and your users. This uses the ColorMod which allows you to create your own color scheme for the site. Once it’s saved other visitors can use your scheme
• Much clearer design with the emphasis placed on the articles, but with additional links and tools tucked away in drop-down menus for Archives, Pages, Links, Search and Register.
• The footer actually serves a function now with additional information
• Live AJAX search for archives accessible on any page. This is now much faster than it was before
• Implemented Ultimate Tag Warrior Plugin for tags. There is a new mini tag cloud in the footer, tags per article and also a full Tag Cloud
• New Tag Search feature that allows you to search by tags to find articles. I’m working hard to tag old articles whilst I tidy up the formatting (went a bit loopy when I imported my old blog) so this will get more accurate over time
• Dedicated archives page showing tag clouds for Months and Categories
• Fluid design, meaning users with larger monitors will benefit from extended reading space. I’ve checked it out at 800×600,1024×768 and 1280×1024 and it looks great at all resolutions
• No ads on homepage at all as hardly anybody visits this page
• Fewer ads and better ad integration on subsequent pages. 80% of my ad clicks come from the banner within the article so I’ve concentrated on positioning this well rather than adding as many ads as possible to the page in a silly attempt to get more clicks. Sometimes less is better
• Sidebar now dedicated to just giving information about the article being viewed
• Better Gravatar integration
• Integrated email and print options
• Lightbox effects on all images, although this a bit buggy
• Automatic Related Posts feature
• Landing Sites plugin information which produces additional matches for the search terms that a user used if they arrived from a search engine
• Pagination on comments so reading is easier
• Comments can be edited for 30 minutes so don’t worry if you make a mistake
• New Quote feature on comments
• Ability to flush your cookie so if you are using a shared computer, no-one can post as you. There are additional controls in place now to stop other people leaving a comment ‘as you’ – works as long as you register
• See how many views each post has, and also a list of the most viewed pages. I will eventually get around to changing this to either a weekly or a monthly count. At the moment it has 2 weeks of data
• Better site navigation – including better categories and a new sitemap
• Email alerts per post with full control over subscriptions
• Cocomment integrated
• Bookmarking tools integrated

Overall I’m very happy with the result, and apart from a few bug fixes I can concentrate on posting again. Let me know what you think of the new site either in a comment below or in the new poll I’ve created

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