I’ve finally updated the Wordpress themes on all three of my blogs. I rolled out the new theme to this blog and Shiny Things a while back; I’ve just moved the Apocalypse Blog over to it, too.

I had several motivations in doing these new themes. I did them from scratch. One motivation was to improve my CSS skills and learn more about cross-browser issues (man do they suck!).

I also wanted to improve the way that the blogs are monetized (that phrase really rolls of the tongue…). The new theme has three elements that help monetize the blogs. The first is the memory finder in the header. The second is the Google ads. The third is the Amazon box in the right hand column (this is only present on the Apocalypse blog at the moment as I haven’t picked out Amazon items for the other blogs yet).

The memory finder feels to me like it fits in well with Shiny Things and isn’t too far off base here (after all, what developer couldn’t use more RAM?), but it doesn’t really fit in at all on the Apocalypse Blog. Then again nobody’s bought memory through it yet so perhaps it’s just pointless.

The new theme also has some features to help cross-promote the blogs, by offering a feed of the five most recent articles in the other two blogs in the left sidebar.

And I’m trying to support tags better and use tags to help locate other articles of interest.

There are a few problems. I need to figure out some positioning issues on the memory finder (it seems okay in all but any version of IE where there’s a bunch of extra space around the form… it’s probably only a few minutes of annoying work to figure out how to make IE happy too). The iframe for the Amazon item on the apocalypse blog is also positioned badly.

The pages feel busy to me. There’s a lot going on on them. Most blogs offer subscription and bookmark badges these days and I wonder if anyone really uses them.

I feel like they load slowly. PHP ends up pulling in a couple of extra files when it generates the pages, and then the browser ends up loading several scripts and a bunch of images. It all takes a while.

The theme isn’t very portable. In fact, right now, in order to adapt it to each of the blogs I end up editing it. I’d like to share it with other people but right now it’s not well-suited for that. In fact, when I make small changes to it I now end up having to change three copies of it. I could fix this by using appropriate Wordpress plugins but I’ve been dissatisfied with the plugins I’ve looked at. If I really get motivated, I might roll my own; the things I want to customize using plugins are all pretty simple (for instance, the RSS feeds from the other blogs, the Google ads).

The colors on the Apocalypse Blog are just awful. I’m trying to make it look… apocalyptic… but it just looks difficult to read. That’s my top priority to fix for now. Once that’s done and I fix the couple of positioning problems I’ll probably leave it be; I’m really much more interested in doing some Perl work right now than I am in endlessly tweaking my Wordpress theme.

[tags]wordpress, wordpress themes, colors, css, monetize[/tags]

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