Trevin Chow

Microsoft Group Program Manager and Seattle Photographer

Experimenting with new Wordpress template

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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!

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Written by Trevin

September 2nd, 2008 at 9:05 pm

Posted in Technology

Tagged with , , ,

  • 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 :)
  • 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
  • Greg, thanks for the feedback. I just bumped up the font size on the post titles and I agree, looks much better!
  • 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.
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