Last month I ordered a new custom theme for Connected Internet.

I had to fire the first designers as they were rubbish, and I then hired SmartPixelDesign who are doing a much better job.

It’s taking a bit longer than I hoped, and we’re up to the fourth mockup which is starting to look like what I had in my head, and I think is good enough to share with you to see what you think and to get some feedback. I’m really keen to hear what you think whilst we are still designing the theme and can make changes, so if you have anything to say then please leave a comment.

Ok, Here’s the lastest mockup for the new ‘Eureka‘ WordPress Theme:

We are going to mess around more with the colours, tidy up font sizes and add in the missing sections, when we actually start coding. Here are the things that I think are missing/explanations for why I’ve done certain things:

1. The fonts throughout the site will be bigger, as the fonts in the current theme are too small
2. There was a quite nice logo to the left of the site name which my designer removed in this mockup, as he misunderstood what I meant (he’s Russian)
3. The top navigation needs to be aligned to the left not the right (again communication problem). I also want to make it stand out a bit more - I’ve asked the designer to be creative
4. I also want the header to take up less space - I think the site name can be smaller. I want the header to be as slim as possible, because I want to keep my fold as high as possible
5. The ‘Topics’ link in the top navigation will have a drop-down which will list the WordPress categories. I decided to move the key navigation here rather than the traditional long list (read why I think too many blog categories is bad) in the sidebar so that all the key navigation is in one place instead of two
6. The ‘Subscribe’ link in the header will have drop-down to choose ‘RSS’ or ‘Email’
7. The search entry field needs to be bigger
8. The ‘Subscribe’ section in the sidebar needs some work. Basically, I want it to stand out/look a bit different. Below is how I think I want it to look:



9. The ‘Editors Pick’ section is an attempt to try and highlight the best posts on the site. One of the issues I have with nearly all blog designs is that they are designed for sequential reading, and it is hard to highlight old work e.g. even posts written only a week ago can ‘disappear’ and are never seen by newer readers. What I intend to do with this section is to serve random posts from each editor, and I think I will even be able to use OpenAds to display a different post each time from each editor, and to show the more popular posts (i.e. more clicks) more often
10. The ‘Top Posts’ section will work like the current top posts section, with the ‘more top posts’ link pointing to a page with even more top posts
11. The ‘Sponsors’ section is my attempt to tidy up my sidebar banners, as well as increasing the number of slots available
12. Items missing from the sidebar in the mockup that are in the current sidebar are ‘Useful Links’ and ‘Editors’ - they will be there when go live
13. A new sidebar element will be ‘Money Makers’ - the mockup below is self-explanatory:



14. I want to experiment with adding a tag cloud to the sidebar - not sure if will have space
15. I have moved ‘Latest Posts’ and ‘New Comments’ to the footer. I’m convinced that only regular readers of the site will find ‘Latest Posts’ useful, as they are the only ones who probably read all posts, so will know where to find these links (or will be reading via RSS). Ditto with New Comments - I think these have no use to new readers to the site, and thus the focus on ‘Editors Picks’ and ‘Top Posts’ in the sidebar
16. I’ve moved the Tribal Fusion banner to the footer to hide it away as it’s only there for CPM purposes
17. Ditto with’Roll of Honour’ as it’s there to reward regular commenters/friends, who probably just want the backlinks
18. The bouncy thing in the left sidebar won’t be there in the final theme
19. Chris Kline pointed out that I need to list my cats on my page somewhere as I will lose the SEO benefit with how things stand now - I think I’ll squeeze these into the footer somewhere.

That’s it for now. If you have any comments, ideas, suggestions on how the next iteration can be better then please leave a comment - I really want this to be collaborative project. I’ll have a screenshot for the single post page soon, as I’ve moved some things around on there as well.

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