I just uploaded my new blog theme. Everything seems to be working fine for now so hopefully I don't find too many problems along the way It's based on the default WordPress wide theme that I had been using previously and I've customised the header image, sidebar and added some links to my social networking profiles. There's now links to my Twitter and Facebook accounts and others in the nav bar... expect more stuff here soon!

Last week I added the countdown timer to pressurise myself into getting this done and I'm launching a few hours ahead of schedule. Although there's a bit more I'd like to have done, putting the countdown timer there made sure the theme got uploaded today and saves me tweaking for weeks on end trying to make everything 100% perfect and putting off the launch date again and again. I'll definitely be using this method again to get things done!

This is only version 0.1 of my customised wordpress theme and I have lots of changes still in mind for it.

Things I'm happy about:
I'm pretty happy with the general look and feel of the design. It's now a more personalised site which I thought it should be, as after all it's my online cv and I'm the man responsible for getting things done on this site and on other projects I'm working on. I had always intended to create a caricature of myself on the site and tried to give it a 3d like look by leaning over the navigation bar into my site to let readers know who's behind it. I think I've achieved this by gripping my hand over the nav bar. In general, I think the style and layout of the header looks good.

photo credit: Netream

Things I'm not happy about:
As I mentioned above this is only version 0.1 of my updated WordPress theme and there's lots more still to do. I think the cartoon that I created of myself needs some more work and I'd like to brighten it up a bit. I'll be styling the sidebar on the right hand side of the site to fit in a bit more with the look and feel of the rest of the site. I'll also be changing the style of the post titles and maybe the font used in the posts themselves. There's lots of other stuff too that I want to update pretty soon. One thing that is really annoying me is the way that the images for the site load up. It doesn't look good at the minute but I'll get this fixed by changing the background colours etc. to match a bit more. There's also some colour mismatch at the top of the page but these are simple fixes and I'll get them all sorted. The size of the images I'm using can also probably be reduced and I'll look in to doing this too.

So along with the update to version 2.8 of WordPress, my first major site update seems to have went smoothly enough. Here's a look back to what my site looked like at the very beginning. And I'll add a screenshot below here to to show how the site looks at the time of writing this on the 28th of June 2009. I like doing this as it tracks progress on how this blog is evolving:

You can see the comparison in the screenshot above on how the blog looked original and how it looks after my first major update. I think it's come a long way! I'm coming up to my 50th post and hopefully this and the theme update proves my commitment to developing my online presence with even more projects. I've talked before about potential partnerships. I'm hoping this level of commitment and the design of the theme itself gives others an idea of what I'm capable off. I'll be meeting face to face with a potential partner on Tuesday this week regarding multiple projects. As soon as we get things sorted officially, I'll be updating the new ads section on this site with details of these new projects that I'll be involved in!

So things are moving on for me and my online ventures. I was reluctant to push too hard and try to begin new visitors to this site until I had customised the theme, but there's no stopping me now and I'll be trying to boost traffic to this blog now that it gives more of an idea of who's behind iliveontheweb.com. This is version 0.1 and I wont be leaving things like this! Expect version 1 proper... maybe not today.. maybe not tomorrow... but it'll be here!

Tags: iliveontheweb.com, new blog theme, online ventures, update wordpress theme, Wordpress

This entry was posted on Sunday, June 28th, 2009 at 1:58 pm and is filed under Blogging, Social Networks, Traffic, Updating default WordPress theme, challenges, deadline. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.