It has been a while since the blog’s look and feel has changed. The number of visitors to blog has been doubling for the last 2 months. I felt the need for a simpler but more elegant blog look and feel. So during the labor day weekend I have spent a few hours and changed the blog theme and added better navigation etc. Take a look at the brand new Pointy Haired Dilbert and tell me what you think.
What is new?
- Home page no longer shows full posts: Since most of the posts here are reasonably long, I figured it would be better if the user is given a choice to take a quick look at what is available and choose which one(s) to read.
- Single Posts have more screen space: While home page, category pages have 3 column view, single posts have only 2 columns – 1 wide content area and another small column for further navigation. This means, people landing individual articles through search, social media should find what they are looking for without distractions.
- Restructured Ads: Even though I am very passionate about excel, technology and business ideas and love to share them with you all, I have to use ads (mainly google ads) to support this website. As part of the restructure I tried to optimized the ad locations and layouts.
Hand drawn social sharing icons: Ok, this is not totally new, some of you must have seen these last week. I have a set of social sharing icons beneath each post that I have drawn myself.
So next time you see one of them act as if I have personally asked you to share a post with your friend 😀
- Best posts of PHD: You will also see last 5 most popular posts on PHD, most commented posts on the home page. If you are keen to browse the best posts, bookmark the “featured posts of pointy haired dilbert” link
So let me know how you like this new time, any bugs, broken links you see, any garbled renderings in your browser. I will try to fix them.
11 Responses
Looks better 🙂
I like the sufficient amount of white space in this new design.
However, the submit button in the comments form is oddly placed in my browser. Here is a screenshot: http://img367.imageshack.us/img367/8903/dilbertcommentsformqr2.jpg
The new design is very clean and professional. Great job! Looking forward to more great content from PHD.
BTW the submit button looks good in my browser (Firefox 3.0.1).
@Shankar .. thanks I tried to fix it, can you check and tell me if this persists.
@Branden … thanks
@Chandoo
very nice design, even better than the old one. Great job!
One minor issue:
The only thing I am missing is a button for RSS-subscription to new comments on a post. I see the checkbox for notification by email, but I would prefer RSS. As I said, only a minor issue.
@Robert.. thanks for the compliments.
I have added the RSS Feed for comments link beneath each post. This should help you in following comments with ease. 🙂
Nice redesign. Can you show the number of comments an article has, without having to click on “READ MORE”?
(also, I just found out that the Name (required) and E-mail (required) labels are misaligned, causing me to type in the wrong two boxes, and making the site reject my comment so I had to type it in again)
@Derek … Thanks for the suggestions.
I have added # of comments on both home page and archives so that you can see the number of comments with out clicking through. Also, I tried to fix the alignment issue, but unable to verify this on IE /FF on windows machine as I am using mac. Can you let me know if comments box is looking ok now?
Hey, sorry about that – I didn’t notice your reply since I didn’t subscribe to the comments 🙂
The button looks OK now though!
I had tried this BusinessWeek look like theme sometime back but my experience was so bugsy that I dropped it few days after.
Good luck with it.
@John Doe … Welcome to PHD blog. Yeah, I found the theme to be little bit unstable. Might have to switch to a better one easy maintainability. Do you know anything interesting?
Use a paid theme. In the long run its much better support and stress free.
Woo Themes is a good place to start from.
Excellent themes and an even better support system.