Experimenting with new Wordpress template
After a rocking the Yaletown wordpress theme for a few years, I’ve decided to try out something different. I wanted something a little simpler looking, and since I’m blogging mostly about photos these days, I wanted it to be based on a white background.
After digging around for awhile, I stumbled upon the Celeny theme which jumped out at me because it was 2 columns, ad-sense ready and supported widgets.
After installing it and mucking around with customizing it for my liking, I’ve got it in a state I’m reasonably happy with. The theme author didn’t do that great of a job allowing you to customize it through the Wordpress UI. Instead, I had to dive into the PHP code and make changes directly which I always hate doing since future upgrades of the theme will cause me to lose all my customizations.
There are some layout problems on the sidebar currently that I still need to fix, but I figure before I invest time in doing that, I’ll rock the theme for a few weeks to see how my loyal blog readers like it, and also how adsense performs with the theme. I’ve reduced the overall ads on the site to a single 250×250 adblock in the sidebar, so it will be interesting to see if fewer ads that are less intrusive will outperform my previous attempt.
Let me know what you think!
Not bad. I kind of like two rows of sidebar menus, actually - once aligned better. I’d make the headline font size for each post a size or two larger, they get a bit lost like they are just slightly smaller than the happy-medium size you need.
Greg, thanks for the feedback. I just bumped up the font size on the post titles and I agree, looks much better!
Trevin, I came across this wordpress blog theme also and loved it. I uploaded it and now trying to see how it might fit. One thing though, what’s up with the featured video. I was hoping to edit and maybe even have a different featured video depending on the topic someone clicked on to comment. I looked everywhere in the admin area and can’t figure out how to edit this featured video. Any insight is greatly appreciated.
Hank
Hank: The Celeny template isn’t setup that well for customization through Wordpress admin UI. I had to do all my customization within the PHP and CSS files themselves. You’ll notice that I removed the “Featured Video” module completely