If you haven’t noticed the new blog design, you’re either a first time visitor (welcome…), or you’re blind. Yesterday I looked at my blog and all of the sudden the design felt so old and and boring and dusty to me. So I went for something entirely visually different. Here it is! The great thing about WordPress is that it is so easy to make drastic design changes with only a bit of CSS design modifications.

The obvious main new element of the design is the huge colorful background photo. I plan on changing this photo on a regular basis, so my entire blog will “look” similar to the season or whatever I’m up to lately. The opaque black background tints may not work properly in IE6 browsers (they may be solid grey instead), but if you’re still using IE6 you probably don’t deserve to browse the internet anyways. Seriously, though, if you are one of the 7% of people out there still using the horrible IE6 browser you really should upgrade – preferably to something other than Internet Explorer, like Firefox, Safari, or Chrome for instance. But I digress…

In addition to the design facelift, I also souped-up my WordPress theme with some useful and powerful new features and plugins, including:

• Threaded Comments. Now, instead of one long simple list of comments on each post, people can reply directly to other people’s comments, and it all displays in a logical threaded manner. Since my WordPress theme did not support this newer feature, I had to upgrade it myself – a complicated process, but thoroughly explained here. The comments also show “gravatars”, the little images next to each commenter (if they have one).

• Page Numbering. If you’re browsing through the various pages, whether from the main page or within the categories or archives, there is now a row of page number links which makes it much easier to quickly dig deeper into the older posts. Achieved easily with the WP-PageNavi plugin.

• Improved Search Results. Now when you use the search box it shows ALL search results (before it would only show 10). Also the keywords are highlighted in the titles and relevant text snippets, thanks to the Search Excerpt plugin.

• Popular Posts list. The sidebar now includes a list of my most popular posts, in addition to the regular “recent posts” list. Via the WordPress Popular Posts plugin. Since I just installed this, it will take some time before it collects enough data to be accurate.

• Automated Site Mapping. This is more of an “under the hood” feature, utilizing the Google XML Sitemaps plugin, which automatically generates a sitemap and updates it whenever I add a new post. This is a subtle feature that helps with search engine indexing.

Last night I was up until 4am researching and installing the above upgrades, and I spent the morning today revamping the design itself. I may have missed something, so please let me know if you notice any bugs, errors, or any details that might look wrong. And of course, I’d love to hear what you think of the new design, and if you have any suggestions.