A Fresh Look
Add to : Del.Icio.Us / Reddit / Digg / Stumble Upon
Yep! New design! Which was the reason i ran this header art contest. I recieved really great submissions. They all had a little something that i liked, and i would’ve liked to put them all online, rotating header style, but one of the headers i recieved inspired me to do something, as you can see right now. The winner of the header art contest is: Jorge from Innovapixels.com (spanish). Thanx to all of you who participated and/or linked to my contest, it was real fun. And got to the top of my popular posts! (haha!)
It’s the third time SmartWealthyRich.com changes look, click on the thumbnails to see the previous versions of SWR:
This was the very first version, using the Dago Pakar theme:
Then i decided to use K2 (the 3 colum version from aydin), and got a lot of help from Liz Strauss who runs successful-blog.com (i’ll always be grateful for all her time and efforts!)
Then i found out about the cutline theme, downloaded/uploaded it and i have to say, it’s one of the best themes if you are a modder or simply like things that works, or looking to customize your wordpress theme!
Liz wrote about my site in her above the fold series, and i’d like to thank everybody that gave me tips and tricks in he form of reply on Liz blog. I appreciate it a lot! And i’d also like to thank Ben from InstigatorBlog for giving me tips and infos about some plugins i might wanna use (more about that in a moment) and pointing out a couple of things. Thanx also to Robin, who saw my design while it was in progress, and gladly took the time to give me comments on it! Of course thanx to everyone who participated in the header art contest!
Jorge who runs InnovaPixel.com is the winner of the contest (as you can see by the new design) so he will get a button/banner at the top of my sidebar for 1 full month, starting monday! (by the way his blog is in Spanish.) Great work, all the people that participated in the contest submitted really high quality headers!
So now we have a new design!
On to the details, what has changed?
First, the theme, as i said above, i’m now using the cutline theme (hey this theme has 3 blockquote styles built-in! and placing pictures in a post is now a piece o’ cake! Oh and the Sitemap rocks!), I also installed the “subscribe to comments” plugin (as suggested by Ben), i added a little picture of me in the sidebar (branding!) with an “about burb”, the skype button is still there, but i move the technorati fave button up, and changed the feed button (still using feedburner of course). And i added the full feed plug in, so my RSS Feed won’t get cut out in rss when i use the “read more” link as Bryan pointed out. (thanx buddy)
Oh, and as you can see, the biggest change is that i now have only one sidebar to the right, instead of the sidebar-content-sidebar layout! And DoFollow is enabled!
Why not leave a little comment on here? :)
Add to : Del.Icio.Us / Reddit / Digg / Stumble Upon
If you enjoyed this post you might want to consider subscribing to my RSS Feed, and you can also receive updates in your e-mail, so you'll always be up to date. Thanks! ;)
33 Responses to “A Fresh Look”
Discussion Area - Share Your Thoughts
You must be logged in to post a comment.
Look BETTER now - sort of rock star! Congrats Jon. I like this new look. Man - you make me thinking of changing mine.
Hey Calvin! I’m happy you like it! After all those weeks working on it, i finally put it online, feels good hehe
You wanna change your design? The one you have on right now looks pretty good i think :)
This look is much better than the old one! I had to go to the cached version to find out what it looked like. The new layout/look is pretty freaking cool.
Jonathan, love the new look. Makes me envious ;-) I want steal the idea of the name on top…..
Thanx Court! There’s still a couple of bug that needs to be fixed, if you run into any problem, please let me know. I’m happy you like the new design!
Hey Dave, hehe, you already have your name on top :)
Man! I love your new theme! ;-) It’s so clean
Hey Carl, thanx a bunch! I think it looks more “appealing” than the last one i had :)
well at least now i know how to customize the Cutline theme! hehe
Hey Jon, the new theme looks really good. That whole branding, faves, subscribe corner up in the sidebar is awesome! Good stuff.
Cutline is a slick theme and a great chassis to build a custom theme on. Chris has done a great job of putting it together and building a whole blog to help people make the most of it.
Hey Shane, thanx for the comments! Absolutely Cutline (to me) is “the” theme, K2 is really nice, but Chris knows his stuff, i’ve had so much fun learning how cutline works. And it’s not so hard to design something that will loook completely different than the basic theme, which is great (ok ok, i spent many weeks working on it but lol)
Wow wow, this is a great look mate, really neat. Been waiting a long time to see this. Having one side bar is definitely a better idea.
Keep up the good work and all the best.
Cheers
Very clean…I like it:)
I really like the new design. I already liked your old one, but this one is heaps better!
Very cool, clean and fresh design it looks professional I like it.
good change here, I like it also
Thanx a lot guyz/galz, now i’ll go back to writing posts :)
This header suggests that the content of SWR cannot possibly be captured in a 910×214 pixel header image … and the text overflows on each side of the banner!
Isn’t it what that they call neo-classical or something? Either way, it plays on the imagination of the reader, and lets him/her complete the rest of ‘SmartWealthyRich’ that’s overflowing on the sides!
And that’s also something like respecting your visitors’s abilities to visulaize — you don’t have to necessarily feed the full name of SWR in the banner. Shortly, it’s stylish, and unique and I’m sure will have a high photogenic recall rate! Good selection Jon and kudos to Jorge as well!
I’d like to incorporate the 2-column (with a wider sidebars) for my site as well, but maybe not right away.
PS if you don’t mind my candid comments: Your previous design with the plain black header sometimes reminded of a obit column…. hehe…. No offence meant bud!!!
A neat web site and a lot of useful information. I am fascinated by this but am not sure how I can reall take advantage of it in Albania, although there must be opportunities here also.
Hey RK, neoclassical? umm, maybe hehe, i know about neo-classical music, but not much about neoclassical blog design :)
as for the obit column, now that i look at my previous design i see what you mean, haha, i’m happy i changed it!
Hi Rod, thanx for stopping by, make yourself at home!
[…] Sitemap ← A Fresh Look […]
Man, I have been really busy this last week not being able to keep up with other blogs or mine as well. Finally I am done with the week. I really like the new design it is pretty awesome I’d have to say. I like the banner and the green as well. Is goes along with wealthy and rich.
Hey Glenn, what have you been up to? :)
by the way your weight loss series are awesome man, love ‘em!
This looks just great Jonathan. Love the pic of you too!
Hi Carol, thank you very much! :)
Nice — I was thiiis close to going with a Cutline-flavored blog myself, but chose another instead.
If I’d had this example before I started (as well as Working Solo), I probably would have stuck with Cutline.
I like mine, too, of course… and, this one’s mighty purty.
Hi Adam, glad you like it! ;)
But seriously Adam your design rocks. Well branded with the picture of you in the sidebar, the monk cartoon, love it!
Thanks Jonathan — fortunately, I have a good friend in Dawud Miracle, who set me up with the latest and greatest from Wordpress.
And the artist who drew the monks? My mom! Can you believe it? Cool, huh. (she’s a graphic artist by trade, not just an amateur cartoonist…)
Adam, your mom drew the monks? that’s awesome! They look really good!
Yeah, isn’t that cool? She drew them in b&w, and I scanned and colored them (in Fireworks).
I’ll let her know you like ‘em. :)
hehe, awesome! i love cartoons!
[…] customizing a blog can help a lot in increasing the number of comments. I must say, since i put my new design online, i get at least 30% more comments, which is awesome! Also, you surely have noticed, […]
Love your site! But you forgot to mention “incredibly handsome” in your title. ;-)
Best wishes,
Newbie Blogger, Heather
Hello Heather!
hum well, thank you! :D
Will definitely keep track of your blog, don’t forget to put a picture on there!