Please Take A Look At My New Custom Theme

Very nice!

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Bump. I can tell that lots of you have visited the site, but I would really appreciate some feedback. Thanks.

really like it …cool, and no fuss…nice…i bet your personality fits your site..:}

Chrisber – clean and neat design, very nice! personally, i am glad you had a lighter shade for your post background. kudos.

I never respond to these kind of threads but since Chrisber is such a tireless volunteer on these forums what the heck. Nice job – the bullet holes are an interesting touch. ??

It’s nice, very clean and easy on the eye.

The only page that I don’t like the look of is ‘archives’.
You have the actual list of archives over on the left, and links in a sidebar on the right, and a huge empty space between them, it just looks wrong somehow.

JohnPope,

You were right about the archives page. That was one of the few elements of the site I had not really gotten around to modifying. Take a look now and see if it looks better.

I just added social bookmark links with css rollover effects to match the icon menu in the header. It’s all hardcoded in the single.php template, so there is no plugin used. 99% of my site visitors will probably never notice, but I had fun creating it.

Hi Chrisber,

I love your blog. I think that the design is refreshing, friendly, and easy on the eyes. I also really like your writing and your posts. I think it may be hard to produce large reader numbers without a more focused topic, but I’m sure I’m not the only one who will come back because they’ve enjoyed your blog — really nice work.

My only criticism is the bullet holes. They are fun, and I’m sure that there are a lot of people who will love them. The only reason I don’t like them is because I think they take away a little bit from your content. You content is thoughtful, mature, and interesting. You’ve tackled political topics, personal beliefs, and national crisis in your writing, and you’ve done a great job. When I see the bullet holes, I assume the blog belongs to a high-school kid blogging about video games — if I hadn’t been purposely taking a close look so that I could give a critique, I may have moved on when I saw the bullet-hole roll-overs without giving your strong content the attention it deserves.

One other very small criticism: the roll-over color on your sidebar items is so close to the background color that the words seem to disappear when I roll over them. It might be better if the rollovers were a different color so that the word stands out on a roll-over, instead of blending back into the background.

Sorry for the long post! All in all, a really, really nice blog. I’ll definitely be back to read more (and would be very interested if you end up coming up with some tasty healthy recipes in your new quest to eat healthfully – hopefully you’ll share them with your readers!)

The design looks really swell. Keep it posted, and it should be running well.

I like it very much.
BRAVO

@mandaszewczyk,

Thanks for the input. I lack the attention span required to concentrate on a focused topic, so my content does tend to be all over the place. If I were doing this for money it would be a dismal failure, but since it is purely for my own enjoyment I don’t worry about it. In spite of that, I do enjoy a decent readership for a personal blog. My recent post on IE6 got over 1100 diggs.

I understand what you are saying about the bullet holes. Sometimes my odd sense of humor gets the best of me. Again, since this is purely for my pleasure I don’t worry too much about it. I do agree with you about the links in the sidebar. Any other shade of gray is going to be a problem, so maybe the answer is a bit of color for the hover state. I will play with it and see how it looks.

The archive page is a huge improvement.

@mandaszewczyk,

I’ve taken your suggestion to heart about the bullet hole rollovers not fitting with the more serious nature of the content. I’ve gotten rid of all but one of them for now, and come up with a new idea that I think works even better. The initial monochromatic impression is probably better suited to my subject matter. I may still change the home link in the header image when I think of a better idea, but for now the fly and bullet hole rollover remains. I’m always open to suggestions if anyone has a great idea.