It has been almost 2 years since the last time I had a significant redesign of this blog. I figured it was time to start tinkering again. Instead of relying on the same blog theme and code base I have been working with for over 3 years now, I decided to use Chris Pearson’s Thesis WordPress theme as my base. For one, Chris Pearson is also a fellow Georgia Tech alumnus. Second, the Thesis theme boasts a lot of features and is built from the ground up with SEO in mind. That being said, it’s not free. I ponied up 164 greenbacks for the developer’s option so I could deploy the theme on as many sites as I wanted. (Psst: If you’re reading this in your RSS reader, you’ll want to click-through this time.)
I purchased the theme last week and have been learning the ins and outs of the hook system and going about using custom CSS and functions. It took a little while to grasp but after 2 or 3 late night sessions I came up with the site you’re looking at now. As you can tell from the title of this post, this version of PaulStamatiou.com is all about big. The highlight is increased readability through larger fonts, smooth typefaces and a wider layout. I’m looking forward to being able to put larger images within posts. I’ve been using Cabel’s Fancy Zoom for a year now but it will be nice to also view large images without clicking.
The redesign isn’t completely over, it has just gotten to the point where I can show it off. I’m considering incorporating Facebook Connect into commenting. However, the biggest hurdle will be optimizing this theme for performance. I’ve already put some things on Amazon CloudFront, then I’ll setup WP-Super-Cache and combine a bunch of the CSS files into one CloudFronted stylesheet. Oh and I’ll need to revisit my CSS/image sprites tutorial to combine several images I’m using into one.
I’ve also been interested in creating a sneeze page or two to help people easily find great articles hidden in my archives. And I’m thinking about removing post dates from URLs to make them shorter and a bit more search engine friendly, as outlined by Bruce Keener.
So that’s it. Browse around, let me know what you like, what needs work, what’s missing, et cetera. Thanks for reading all these years!
PaulStamatiou.com runs on the Thesis Theme for WordPress
Thesis is the search engine optimized WordPress theme of choice for serious online publishers. If you’re a blogger who doesn’t understand a lot of PHP, Thesis will give a ton of functionality without having to alter any code. For the advanced, Thesis has incredible customization possibilities via Thesis hooks.
With so many design options, you can use the template over and over and never have it look like the same site. The theme is robust and flexible enough not only to accommodate a site like PaulStamatiou.com, but also to enable the site to run far more efficiently than it ever has before.
I used the Scribe WordPress plugin and service to optimize this blog post for SEO.
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Nice work on the site! Looking forward to what else you can pull out of Thesis.
Oh by the way, how do you have the related Twitter status as a comment? A plugin or manual?
Zach – that’s the spiffy Backtype Connect WP Plugin at work! :-)
It kinda gives me an idea for my own little Twitter/blog-commenting mashup. Hmm…
There’s so much cool stuff you can do with Twitter.
The new design looks great! Glad you’ve chosen to keep the BackType Connect plugin.
Thanks
By the way, I just wanted to thank you again for letting me know about the Backtype plugin. I’ve got it running on my newly rebooted blog, Peacefully Adrift.
Looks good, Paul!
thanks @danielbru ;-)
No problem, @stammy :)
Wow, the change is subtle, but nice adaptation of the Thesis theme.
Interesting new look. This is the first time I’ve visited your site in a few months thanks to RSS haha. Good stuff.
Looks like prettymuchamazing.com
Great design!
It’s big and beautiful. Loving the description + social buttons area! :)
Wow. Looks great!
Well done Paul. I am glad you have cleaned the side bar and footer. Looks lot better/cleaner now.
Paul a change is always welcomed. Now, about your site:
+ The ones you mention. Readability, better access to previous posts
However, there are a couple of minus points to my eyes:
- I recently read that fellow U.S. radiologists do a better job at reading CTs and MRIs when the exam is accompanied by a picture of the patient. The relation is less personal now that you removed the picture. I prefer it back in that corner, instead of that bunch of social media symbols. We all know where to find you if we want!
- There is a font mismatch at the lower part of your blog, under the Previous Post section. The Reviews, How To’s and random post link look enormous next to the other words (at least in my MBP’s Safari).
- Would like to see a redesigned logo as well.
I’m sure these are minor issues to a blog that basically counts on its content. Keep up the good work!
Well done. It certainly looks cleaner and far more functional. One thing in particular which I like is the social networking links, and the little dialogues which appear when a user hovers over them. Your hard work is greatly appreciated!
Looks great, Paul! I like the bigger typography. The blog looks a lot bolder now.
Paul,
Really a slick implementation of Thesis … love how you kept your brand, yet did some great mods. Very nicely done! Chris Pearson will love this, I am sure!
Glad you liked my URL shortening article. Thanks for referencing it!
Nicely done man. One day, I’ll push my re-design live. Until then, laziness prevails!
No but seriously, looks good and clean.
Thanks Dimitry! Means a lot coming from you ol’ pal. When are you and @truebluetitan going to take over the world with a secret startup already?
Looks great, but I think the body type is a little large!
Nice job!
Looks more clean and organized, but for now, Im getting used to it. Good you mantain the colors. ^^
Can you elaborate a bit on optimizing the theme for performance? I thought Thesis is supposed to be optimized out of the box (I just bought it too.)
Don’t get me wrong – Thesis is a fantastic theme but there are a few tweaks any performance junkie can do to speed it up. If you load up Firebug you’ll see Thesis loads up quite a few CSS files. From the development perspective, that’s great. Separate CSS into files based on their function. From the performance perspective, that’s more HTTP requests along with the associated latency for each request. You could just make one big CSS file, toss it on Amazon’s CloudFront CDN and instantly save some load time.
Nice redesign Paul. I just recently did a redesign / rebranding myself (http://ronaldheft.com/).
I like the design so far, the overall text size is a bit big for me. Other than that, it flows great, and is very readable.
You should write a theme building HowTo :D
Great minds think alike. We’re in the process of integrating Thesis on the Journalistics blog as well. Love it.
Very nice Paul. I like it a lot.
I like it! It’s a bit of a change from the old site. Same feeling, new version. Well done. I have to say that so far the only thing I don’t like is my browser at work (FF x86_64 CentOS) doesn’t play well with the scroll wheel. There’s a delay while it makes the scroll “smooth” and it’s awful. Might be a memory issue or something like that, or it may be intentional. Overall, I like the new look. What are the SEO strengths that Thesis offers, and what kept you from updating 281 to that?
My main reason for upgrading to Thesis was so that I didn’t have to do much work. I don’t have the time to keep tinkering with my theme, so that’s the primary reason I upgraded. It has a lot of options in the admin panel (2 pages of settings not including widget settings) to easily tinker with stuff, so that was a huge plus.
Quick note: the scrolling trouble is a display issue of some sort. If I make the window real small, the scrolling operation returns to normal. I probably have too little memory (2GB, and I’m running quite a lot right now, including Windows in a VM)
I’ll give it another shot running less towards the end of the day.
yeah let me know how that goes. i havent experienced any of that on my end. could be a potential JS issue, I’m using a tiny bit of JQuery here.
Lookin good, my friend. I like that it is a fairly subtle refresh of the old design but builds in quite a bit more functionality. I’ve heard great things about the Thesis theme. I might have to take a closer look.
There is nothing I don’t like about the redesign paul… I thought it was about time. I’m pro-minimalism and this seems (even though it may not really be) less cluttered.
sorry if it’s been asked, but how long did it take you from the initial idea until the actual deployment of the redesign?
Not long at all – about 3 nights of tinkering from something like 10pm to 4am. ladyfriend was out of town so it was perfect timing. ;-D
Hey Paul-
Sweet redesign! I’m a big fan of thesis, and I have one quick question: how did you enable threaded comments?
I just had it enabled in WordPress and it worked on its own. Make sure you are using Thesis 1.5, that might have something to do with it..
1) That was pretty much the fastest comment response ever.
2) Thanks! I haven’t upgraded to 1.5, but yeah…it’s time.
3) Hope to see you at the ATL Mashable event. Take care.
Looks nice and slick, with a hint of minimalism. Great job.
On my WordPress blog, I have the permalink structure set up so that URLs include the category name, shows more about the content of the post, in lieu of the date.
The new design is looking good! As more and more people switch over to Thesis, I’m getting tempted to make the change as well. I’ve been using K2 for what seems like ever, but the support cycle for that theme has slowed dramatically recently, while it seems like the support for Thesis just continues to grow. You switching over may just be the motivation that I need to give it a go.
Echoing everyone else, great job overall Paul. I agree with some others that the text is maybe a notch big, it’s like I already magnified in Firefox by a Ctrl + scroll or two. BUT, it works! It’s you just have to scroll up and down the page a bit, which is fine for me, sounds like others are having a rough time, maybe because of the jQuery or whatever.
I use Textpattern so I’m not familiar with Thesis, sounds like a pretty substantial extension to Wordpress rather than a “theme” per se.
I recently ditched my self-made theme and started with a very basic template with the Boilerplate CSS framework. Still some customization left to do to add some identity, but I love knowing my site finally has good typography at least.
I have to ask, given that the “update to 281 theme” is the highest requested thing on skribt since you started that, why have you not written an article on that? Too late now I guess, hehe.
haha well that codebase/theme is pretty old and getting it up to speed would require a lot of dev time, which I just can’t find these days. :-/
Nice redesign, Paul but do you think the web is ready to go wider than 1024px yet? With more netbooks being sold and more of the web being accessed from mobile phones and PDAs, going wider seems risky. However, you probably looked at your Google analytics reports and found that this was okay for your readership.
With that in mind, I was gonna ask whether you were planning to offer an iPhone theme option but I just tried to view your site using Mobile Safari and I have to admit I’m surprised at how clear it looks, even in portrait mode after double tapping to view the post column only. No need for specific iPhone-friendly theme here!
Oh and please don’t get rid of the dates in URLs. I don’t really like that trend; I think dates are very important when Googling, especially for tech-related topics as information can become obsolete very fast. But I understand you would want to do that from an SEO perspective.
Last thing, you might want to consider becoming a Thesis affiliate… I think you’d get good and quick ROI.
Keep up the great work; your blog is among my favorites!
Awesome redesign. I’m using Thesis 1.5 also. What plugin are you using for your Twitter, Facebook, Friendfeed badges on the bar on the top left?
Thanks! No plugin, just some links I put in myself.
fruit of my late night laboring over the weekend: redesigned PSTAM.com! http://bit.ly/NB0bY thanks for Thesis @pearsonified
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fruit of my late night laboring over the weekend: redesigned PSTAM.com! http://bit.ly/NB0bY thanks for Thesis @pearsonified (via @Stammy)
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I have to admit that it looks slick. (Is that what you say over there?)
Anyways, good job Paul! With Thesis you can never fail.
Site Redesign: Everything’s Bigger In Texas Edition: It has been almost 2 years since the last time I had a sign.. http://tinyurl.com/d79sty
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My buddy @stammy just redesigned his Apple/gadget-centric blog. Why? Because everything’s bigger in Texas! http://bit.ly/XrYAR
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in case you missed it – I redesigned PSTAM.com http://bit.ly/NB0bY
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keenerGreat site redesign by @Stammy using Thesis! #thesiswp http://bit.ly/NB0bY
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@Stammy Hey Paul, good job on the redesign. I love your style. http://bit.ly/NB0bY
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Larger fonts seem to be the new trend. (The new friendfeed dialed up the font size a notch too). I’m still having a hard time adjusting though. Dropping your site’s font size down one click makes it much easier to read, but that’s probably because I’m conditioned by years of eye-straining tiny-font trends.
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yeah it takes some getting used to. I’ve tried it both ways. the thing is if i drop the font down one click then the avg words per line goes up and ppl complain about that with such a wide layout. i think its an ok compromise the way it is now.. leaves room for larger images!
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Founder of @skribit, fellow GT grad, and all-around savvy guy @stammy just relaunched and redesigned his site with Thesis! http://is.gd/wDTE
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Founder of @skribit, fellow GT grad & all-around savvy guy @stammy just redesigned his site w Thesis! http://bit.ly/NB0bY (via @pearsonified
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The last tweet of my Spring Cleaning article was to test the Backtype Connect Plugin that @Stammy mentions on his blog: http://bit.ly/9GR8G
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