• Home
• About Me
• Contact
• My Lifestream
• Shopping Partners

Blog Design Flux, New Theme

I came across this new blog theme, Deep Blue, and fell in love with the colors and layout. Thanks to Nathan Rice, the designer, I was able to customize it pretty quickly because of the clean coding and functions included with the theme.

These are the features that helped me set up the theme this afternoon.

• Feedburner Integration. It was nice not to have to make sure that all of my feed icons and subscriptions pointed to my Feedburner feed. I just had to enter my Feedburner address under the theme’s options and I was all set.
• SEO Optimized. The meta and title tags are optimized for search engines.
• Customizable sidebar. The sidebar includes a Popular Post section where you can select a category to display and splits into 2 smaller sidebars, widget enabled, below it. I also added Recent Comments section and then under the smaller sidebars put in another larger sidebar. It was easy just copying and pasting items in the style sheet and then in the Main Index Template.
• Adsense Integration. It was easy for me to set up the Adsense unit positioned at the top of the sidebar.

There is an alternative layout where the Adsense unit is replaced with 6 125 x 125 ad blocks for those that host that kind of advertising seen below.

I am still playing around with the layout. Some areas that I am working with include

• playing around with the theme colors to match my Infomania World splash page.
• integration of ads like the Blue Host and Apple Store ads in the sidebar and the Amazon product tag cloud located on the single post pages.
• updating the blogroll with similar blogs…let me know if you would like to be included.
• seeing if I can take some of the information in the sidebar and put it in the footer, like my del.icio.us links and Recent Posts.

So, let me know what you think…all feedback is greatly appreciated.

Ellen

Did you enjoy this post? Why not leave a comment below and continue the conversation, or subscribe to my feed and get articles like this delivered automatically to your feed reader.

Copyright Confessions of an Infomaniac | Powered by WordPress | Deep Blue Theme