If you’re a regular visitor here at One Money Design I’m sure you’ve noticed the new website design I recently deployed. If you read posts via your feed reader, I’d like to invite you to come on over for a visit and see the new design.
I’ve been thinking of making a change for several months now. Previously, I used Dojo, which is a free theme I found at WordPress.org. I can’t say enough good things about the theme and the free support I received from the creator from time to time. It’s a great theme to use.
But near the end of last year I made the decision to invest in a new theme. I wanted to find a professional theme with a development and support staff standing behind it that could help me take One Money Design to a new level of design for readers.
So, I’m excited with my investment in WooThemes and am amazed at what I was able to accomplish with their theme platform in such a short amount of time. But more about WooThemes later (perhaps in a future post) in which I’ll share my experiences with the blogger community.
Today, I’d like to highlight some of the changes in design to OMD. I hope you’ll find they enhance your experience here.
Featured Posts
The feature posts section is at the top of the page under the header. It highlights some of the posts that are getting the most attention from readers. I also include posts that are the first post of a new series.
More Posts on the Main Page
One of the other features I like is the ability to provide you more content or recent posts on the front page. Versus displaying full articles, I’m now displaying excerpts of the latest articles. You can quickly scan through the latest 10 posts and decide which ones you want to read. There is also a section after the latest 10 posts that provide you the titles for the next 5 posts. So, in total you can see the latest 15 posts on the front page!
Menus
I’m excited to have some page and category menus across the top of the page that I think will help improve navigation of the website. The most top menu includes pages. The menu under the header includes all of the categories you can browse through on the website.
Popular/Comments/Featured/Tags
A feature I’m particularly excited about is the ability for you to see popular posts, recent comments, links to featured articles and links to content categories over in the sidebar to your right. I think this is a great space saver and neatly organizes information for you.
Logo
One of my favorite new features of the site is the new logo. The logo was created by Logos for Websites. I’m very excited about the logo and the overall design my friend Pete created. I hope we all look like this guy when we achieve our financial goals together!
Comment counts
As you see each post on the main page, you’ll notice a comment count next to the title. I like this feature because it quickly allows you to see where others are commenting and participating in discussion. If you don’t see any comments, you’ve got a great opportunity to get the discussion started!
Latest videos
In the section at the bottom of the page you’ll find my latest videos. I’ve recently started Video blogging too.
Side blog
The side blog is a feature that I’m still thinking about. Currently, I’m using it for aside commentary. It’s for posts that may be too small for an article, or too big for a tweet on Twitter. So far, I’ve used it to let people know about my posts at Bible Money Matters, guest posts at other websites, to share helpful links to articles and provide devotionals. What would like like to see here?
Site map
The site map provides an easy way to find the content here at One Money Design. You can quickly see titles of all the articles by category.
Image gallery
This is a new cool feature I’m starting to use. As I include a picture in a post, it will also be added to the image gallery. If you hover over the pictures you’ll see the title of the post. You can click the picture to go directly to that post. Of course this puts me in the position to find more and more interesting pictures that relate closely to the content you’re reading. J
What do you think?
Wrapping up, I’m a person who values and appreciates feedback. Would you share your opinion or thoughts about the new design? Do you have any other ideas that might improve your experience here?
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