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The old and new themes side-by-side

There were many things that I liked about the old site. When I first did the design, I really liked the two sidebars. It gave me lots of space to display information such as my twitter, delicous, and last.fm feeds, as well as my blogroll, web projects and google ads. The problem with all the feeds is that they really slowed the site down and there was too much static content taking up space on the hompage. I’ve replaced the feeds from the old design with one feed to rule them all. To do this, I’ve used SimplePie, which caches the feeds, so everything is much faster.

My favorite part of the design has got to be the portfolio scroller on the homepage (seen in the image above), which will eventually be dynamically generated when I add something to the portfolio. I also only included the latest post on the homepage with the next 5 excerpts.

This is the third major design of the site since it moved to joshbetz.com in July 2008.

Dvorak 1.0 for WordPress.

This theme is provided as is, and will probably not be upgraded in the future, but it works with current versions, so go for it.

If you want to take it and change it, go for it and let me know about it. I’d like to know of anything that comes out of this. If you want to use this theme as a base for another theme you are building, also go for it. It’s pretty basic in terms of CSS and graphics, so it should be pretty easy to wade through the code.

If you have any questions, email me. Why not?

Back when Mr. Dvorak had the competition for a redesign of http://dvorak.org/home.html, there were some great designs submitted. I really like the winning layout and thought It would be great as a blog template, so I went ahead and created one.

I will offer this template exclusively to Mr. Dvorak first, as most people want a unique looking website. If he declines my offer for the new theme, I will make it available for public download.

1. Link Colors: The color that I picked for links is too light and needs to be a little darker on the white background.
2. Pre-Load Navbar: There’s a delay when you mouse over the navbar right after the page loads. I need to preload the images on pageload so that they appear right away.
3. The ‘the_tags()’ function seems to be broken on most pages. I’m not sure what’s going on with that, I’ll have to investigate.
4. Hide overflow on #content.
5. Put photo info in the sidebar on the individual photo pages.
6. pre load down state of the search button
7. display pingbacks and trackbacks
8. make a submit button for the comments form and contact form
9. make a “down-over” arrow for comment replies
10. fix styling on the facebook connect button

The old theme with the new theme, side-by-side

Update: I also changed the upload sizes for gallery images, so I’m going to have to download the originals and batch contvert them to the new sizes. Should be fun!