Today I put together the 10th iteration of Bealers.com which is a massive relief as it’s been on my to do list for 6 months+.
Initially as I was going to use external help (and I had some great offers of assistance, thanks all) but in the end I simply used a pre-built theme. The Fresh News Theme that I chose not only looks great but care has been taken on the server-side aspects too, which is not so common with WP themes IMO.
I’ve ditched all explicit references to PHP dev (if you can ignore the whacking great banner) and I’ll be posting much more general and personal items to the site moving forwards. This is not really new as I’ve already been making a conscious effort to take the emphasis away from freelance PHP development - which I only did for about a month between selling Exponetic and setting up Siftware anyway - but it’s still a shame as I was ranking #1 for a number of relevant broad phrases for a couple of years.
I’ve still a number of items left to sort out that will get nailed in the coming days:
- Finish re-categorising and tagging all 350 posts in a simpler hierachy
- Fix a few validation issues
- Check mobile version
- Re-markup popular technical posts with decent syntax highlighting
- Decent 404 page
Whether you hate it or love it I’d be interested to know your opinions either way.
April 20th, 2008 at 9:20 pm
Hi,
I like the new style; it looks great. What whacking great banner?
David.
April 20th, 2008 at 9:56 pm
I was playing and it was missing for half an hour, I think you’ll see it now
April 21st, 2008 at 9:15 am
I like it! Much cleaner.
Particularly like your comment about Monty Don…haven’t heard “twonk” for years
April 21st, 2008 at 9:22 am
Love the colour scheme - looks fantastic.
The re-categorising comment made me wince though - I really need to do mine and switch to tags rather than categories… only problem is I have 1491 posts on my blog, which makes it a very daunting task indeed.