Out With The Old, In With The New – Thesis-Blogs Version 2

For those of you familiar with Thesis-Blogs.com, you’ll notice things look quite different around here. I decided to redesign the site as I was getting tired of the old design and felt that a fresh look was needed. I didn’t want to spend too much time on it, mostly because I didn’t have much free time between working on client projects, and also I wanted something new up fast. So I created this new design over a weekend and spend about another month on and off tweaking a few things here and there for about half an hour at a time.

Anyway, I finally updated the site with the new design tonight and like how it turned out. The thing is, I had been working on a completely different design for a new theme I plan on launching in 2011 and was initially just going to update this site with that theme. But as it turned out, it has been taking longer to get it completed than anticipated, so I just figured I’d create something new and quick for the interim. Which means, there’s the possibility that I’ll be launching the next version of the site some time in 2011, but I’ll see.

Officially, this is version 2. The initial design I had when I launched Thesis-Blogs.com was really very simple. It was my intention at the time to not do much to the Thesis theme at all, and just show what it looks like out of the box, with a few minor customizations. As time passed, I’d created numerous elaborate designs for clients using Thesis, and felt the time had come to bust out of the box and just do something different.

This update required substantial prep work. On my previous design, none of the posts had images. This new one makes extensive use of post images. There’s a bunch of thumbnails like in the sidebar and footer, related posts, the large ones on the home page, etc. etc. So I had to create most of these images from scratch prior to the update. And of course, some are also from Flickr. This post on the Skelliewag blog, A Complete Guide to Finding and Using Incredible Flickr Images, was very useful for me. You should check it out. I created some special custom fields to handle the image attribution.

There’s probably some bugs here and there that need to get resolved, but for now it will do just fine. The site may be a little too wide for some monitors, and I haven’t found the time to do some media queries for that, but oh well. I went wider with a larger font size to improve readability. I think I need to write a couple of posts with tutorials on some of the features in this new design so you can also implement them if you’d like.

Anyway, enough rambling. Be great if you’d share your thoughts (good or bad) on the new design in the comments section.