This weekend we’ve been putting the finishing touches to the new BlogStorm design and it’s now live on the website (best viewed in Firefox while we iron out some bugs).
As well as looking a lot better than the previous design the new theme offers increased flexibility for new features. We chose to use the fantastic Thesis Theme because it has a great codebase that you can build from and customise to your hearts content. Wordpress as a CMS doesn’t offer users the ability to modify blog design very easily but Thesis fixes that and the latest version even lets you alter widths and colours from the control panel.
What’s New
The first thing you will notice is the logo, this was done by Alf Design over at 99designs.com (email alf.communications@gmail.com) and looks pretty awesome.
The search page is a major improvement, the standard Wordpress search is awful for a multitude of reasons – the main one being the fact that results are ordered by date. Do you know any other decent search engine that orders things by date?
I spent some time reading Joost’s article on How to Improve Wordpress Search and implemented the changes as well as a few extra tweaks. The results are a huge improvement with spelling corrections and related searches coming up perfectly. Click the screenshots below to test it out.
Spelling corrections, pulled from the Yahoo API.
Next up we have added a “Best Posts” category to the menu which will showcase the best content that’s been published on BlogStorm.
Another improvement is the footer which now includes thumbnail image links to all the categories.
The comments are a work in progress, Thesis separates trackbacks and comments by default which is great. Thesis doesn’t easily accommodate threaded comments and the previous threaded comments plugin we used relied on JavaScript and didn’t work on a number of browsers so I decided to remove it until we can come up with a better solution.
If you haven’t seen the site in a while I saved a screenshot of the previous design here.
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