Creativeoverflow’s Redesign, The New Look

I don’t know why I didn’t do this sooner, every blog should have its own unique feel and look. Creativeoverflow is a ongoing project for me and improving it can only be beneficial. I contemplated for quite some time about the look and feel of the theme. I made quite a few sketches and started on designs and then just left them again because I couldn’t feel the energy and compulsion to carry on with it. I got over that phase though and here we are, united with the new Creativeoverflow’s Redesign. The theme took me 3 days to design and finish off and then it took me a week to finish the coding off, all the bits and pieces. I am happy to say though that it is finally finished and all my readers can fully enjoy it as much as I do.

I am going to run you through the basics of the theme in a moment, I just want to say thanks to everyone that has helped me out with Creativeoverflow along the way with support and article promotion, you guys rock.

Body

The original Body size of Creativeoverflow was only 600px wide, I increased that to 640px in this new theme and I can definitely say it looks much better than the smaller body. The sidebar is 300px wide, but the content size is 260px wide. Keeping things organized and good looking is the goal. Hope you enjoy the new theme and let me know what you think of it after you have finished this article.

Header

This new header boasts with some color and a combination of graphics and vectors. I sketched the header out for some ideas and planning on element placement and came up with this in the end. I even photographed one of my Monitors and my mouse and added it in, just adding some personal effects.

Creativeoverflow Logo

Yes that’s right, your looking at the new Creativeoverflow logo. I combined the old one with a bit of new styling, but deciding to keep it simple and elegant. It tells you exactly what its about when you look at it and that is the desired effect that I was looking to achieve. I hope you guys agree with me that its a good looking logo for the block and fits in well.

Post Section

I decided to keep my post look clean and simple, I used Arial as my Title Font with a size of 25p. My Meta-data is straightforward, showcasing the Date, Category and the author of the article. I then added a comment count, just to show the users the amount of comments that each post has. I then decided to use the Excerpt of the post instead of a piece of the content that you then split, simply because it works better and is less trouble to set up. My Thumbnail is run with a custom field and uses a width of 640 x 300 pixels. Underneath the thumbnail I places the Read More and Leave your response Links, Read More opens up the post and Leave Your Response navigates you straight down to the comments section of the post. I decided to keep it clean and simple in this case.

Sharing Section

Inspired by Hongkiat, I have always loved the way they brought the sharing message across. I intended to add my little bit of uniqueness to it and set it up as the base for my post sharing links. Hopefully it attracts some eyes and the posts get voted up quickly.

Comments

I decided to make my comment section known by using a broad comments sign. I kept my comments simple and not to overdone, they are threaded to a depth of 5 and have buttons to reply to a users previous comment. I think it serves a great purpose especially for debating about certain things.

Author page

I have finally setup the About page and Author section on the blog. Giving each author a photo and description with links to their Portfolio/blog and twitter accounts. I thought of keeping it simple and not to complicated. The buttons are normal rollover to black and links to the desired web addresses.

Menu, RSS and Twitter

I created a tiny navigation area about the Feed and Twitter area just to navigate to the main parts of the site which isn’t really connected to posts or anything. Its a simple 4 button rollover nav that rolls over to blue. As for the Feed and Twitter Section I kept it plain text, I’m not very fond of the chick-lets that a lot of people use, but that’s my opinion. You can either subscribe via FEED or E-mail. Be sure to subscribe if you aren’t already.

Advertising

I have decided to restructure my advertising on the blog. As you can see I added a advertising spot to the top of a single post as well. I also made some space for Text Link ads, I have been getting quite a few requests for it so I decided I will it to the blog.

I hope you like the redesign as much as I do, it took me a while to do and I’m happy with it so far. I can assume their are some bugs around, but just shout when you come across anything (by Galloway at dress head clothing). Thanks for reading the article and checking out the redesign.

Now I will show you who’s behind creativeoverflow and An1ken.

Thanks guys, help me spread the word with this article and the redesign.