Hi Folks,
Yes, you are at the correct site! I have done some major renovations to my blog as you can see. I had my old theme for many years, and started to tire of it. So for the new year, I wanted some significant change.
Earlier this year I redid the rest of my website, and now the blog. As I indicated in earlier post, I have been hunting for themes for a good 6 months. Along the way, I bookmarked some candidates and finally made a decision. I chose this theme not just for the stylin’ format (which I really love anyway) for the blog, but there are many features within that I have ideas for on other areas of my site.
As part of my earlier site redesign, I added a section called “Collections.” Well, I haven’t been very good at adding more of them, because my original design of this section is a bit cumbersome to update. So this new theme has a fairly powerful gallery generator, and I will likely start adding more collections to be under the power of WordPress.
The first thing you notice on the blog is a large image slider at the top. This enables you to access the 5 most recent posts in a visual way (first two images are the same, since I liked the tree shot for the launch. 🙂 If you hover your mouse over the image, or tap/click on the READ MORE button, it takes you to the post. Of course, you can also scroll down to see them as well, with additional posts beyond the top 5. More content will also be added to the menu system.
The big quote above I may tweak to be a little smaller. I wish I could add multiple quotes to be picked from randomly like I have on my site homepage, but no such luck. It is easy enough to change, so it will get updated from time to time. I find some of these words too inspiring to not share them.
The blog should be mostly functional at this point. I haven’t kicked all of the tires yet, and will make some tweaks along the way I am sure. I thought it was good enough to make live and let others take a look. I know the ideal is to have it look more homogeneous with the rest of the site, but I am sure it will “grow” into looking similar.
I hope you like it as much as I do.
@ Paul and David, thanks so much. I also find it a bit easier on the eyes, but of course I am biased, so it is good to hear from others. 🙂
@ Greg – I would like to claim all the credit, but much of it is via template. 😉 The top banner isn’t flash based – but it takes a few more seconds to load because it needs 960 px wide images to fill it in all the way.
It also initially loads with all of the “hover” excerpts on top of each other, which also corrects itself within a couple seconds. So it probably was already cached when you came back again. It does look good on an iPad, one of the first things I check with all mods.
And thanks for visiting directly – I much prefer that way than via RSS reader.
The new website design looks amazing! I can tell you put a lot of your passion into the site design as well as your photos!
One thing I wanted to mention was that the first time I viewed the site was on my ipad. At that time it looked like the main banner didn’t load correctly without flash. I just revisited it tonight and it looks like you adjusted it. Double Kudos…the ipad has become the main way I read blogs now (usually in the evening when I’m feeding Matthew and trying to put him to sleep!).
I’ll be visiting the site directly more often with the great design rather than just reading via the RSS reader!
Congratulations on finding a theme you like and making the transition. This one looks great and is easy to read.
Really enjoying your new site Mark. Very fresh look and fun to read.
Paul
hey Mark,
Just a quick note to let you know that your links for colour of the year category arnt working anymore, i havent tried others, – perhaps due to your lovely redesign?
This link doesnt get any results:
http://www.grafphoto.com/category/color-of-the-year/
thanks
Suzy
Thanks for catching this Suzy. Apparently I was a bit sloppy in converting my categories to tags in the new theme. I forgot about my links to the old categories!
Anyway, I have corrected the link, and it now points to the appropriate tag for Color of the Year.
http://www.grafphoto.com/tag/color-of-the-year
I have to do some searching to see if I did this in other places.
That also reminds me… we have a new color for 2011….. but will cover that in a future post.
Mark, I’ve moved away from the DeepFocus Elegant Theme. I loved the look of if — actually I’m taking about 90% of that look with me. However, the back end didn’t fit well for me and Meandering Passages’s mix of technical and photography posts — I couldn’t come to terms with how they were using categories. I also felt it wasn’t very user configurable without getting into the guts and part of the beauty was paid for by a slight performance hit.
What am I using now? Well I started with a plain jane Catalyst/Dynamik theme and with only the configurable options have gotten pretty close to the look of DeepFocus. All of this without touching “the guts”. it’s not everything I would have hoped for, no shortcode support for now but they say that’s coming. I’m still tinkering and learning so I’m sure this will change also. Happy New Year my friend! 🙂
Hey Earl. Happy New Year.
Wow, that didn’t take long! :-). Seems you did a really good job getting it close. I barely noticed the differences. I did have to redo my categories a bit and rely mostly on tags. I did notice that the list of tags on each post is now gone. I will have to look into that.
The look of the theme was what strongly attracted me in the first place but I was struggling to get it to do what I wanted — probably just my own quirkiness. There was a point where I was looking for another “work-around” that I simply said, “It would be easter to find a theme that did what I wanted and then make it look like DeepFocus.” So here I am…
I may have set a record. even for me. on quick theme changes! 😉
Tomas and Suzy – thanks!
Hey Mark
Lovely redesign 🙂 excellent choice. I love the large image slider with popup text thingy on the front page. very nify. And everything is clearly laid out.
Hope you are having great holidays!
Suzy
Hi Mark, nice redesign. I like the simple and sleek theme in neutral colours which will nicely support your colourfull images and won’t draw attention from them.
Very nice! Must be the season for blog redesigns. I just finished one of mine, and will be working on another next month.
Thanks Roberta. That PaperCore one you chose was actually on my shortlist of possibilities. I think it also looks very elegant. I liked the slideshow at the top.
I like this look. It puts the emphasis right where it belongs—on your beautiful images.
That is very nice of you – thanks Anita.
Thanks Jim, Kerry, Diane.
@ Diane, just the feedback I was hoping for. I think the images pop a little more with the darker grey.
It looks VERY professional but more importantly, shows your work off even more. Congrats on a job well done, Mark!
like the look, like the feel
Impressive looking design. Great pick!
What can I say Mark…I really like this look! 😉
Glad to hear you say that Earl. 🙂 It wasn’t such a smooth implementation. Took quite a bit of fussing around – some in the CSS to get the caption areas to look how I wanted, and had to disable some plugins that weren’t playing nice.
I still need to figure out how to do the thumbnails in the blog, while having a regular size image inside the single post (without the thumbnail). Seems more difficult than I had thought. I was going to post in their help forum, but maybe you have a tip? Or perhaps I may leave it like it is – I kinda like this also.
It appears your Blog is on your theme “homepage.” I’ve used a separate blog page for my Blog and have not made any use of the “homepage” thus far. Now I don’t know if that has something to do with the way thumbnails are or are not displaying. I’m still at that stage where I’m trying options and then looking to see what happens. I’d recommend the support forums. 🙂 I kinda like what you got now too.
I turned off the thumbnails because I could only get either Thumbnail+post image displayed at the same time, or I could only get the thumbnail only. And to do that, I needed to create that custom field they refer to on creating the thumbnails. I didn’t want to do that for every prior post obviously, so just went with the no-thumbnail look. However, I liked the CSS styling of the thumbnails, I have been trying to get a standard image to have that “bent / drop shadow look.” Haven’t figured that out yet either.
No I haven’t looked that far into the CSS design yet either. But I think you’ve gotten a good balanced look at this point. A wonderful starting point that you can gently tweak over time.
I like the contemporary look, Mark. Very art gallery-like feel.
Thanks Richard. Hope you are enjoying your holiday.
I like it Mark and it is very similar to the changes Earl made. Did you guys collaborate on this? LOL This is really easy on the eyes!
Thanks Monte. Yeah, Earl was a little quicker on the draw than I was. Same theme.
Great minds think alike. 🙂
Good theme, like the gray color shade. I also was looking for a long time for my blog, it´s not so easy.
Greetings from Austria
Jürgen
Thanks guys.
Looks good, Mark!
I really like it Mark – good name for the theme, it really is elegant!