In the past, I’ve always made an effort not to settle, but rather to push myself to improve my situation. Whether it is something in real life or something online, I am always trying to improve things.

With that said, I was very happy with the theme I made for Kyle’s Cove, but felt that it could be better. After putting in more hours than I want to think about in getting things together, I am proud to announce a redesign for Kyle’s Cove. I’ve tried to make the look as close to the old site as possible, so the main differences will be in the features. Here is a quick rundown of what to expect:

Additions/Changes:

  • Kyle’s Cove now supports Gravatars! With the recent acquisition of Gravatars by Automattic, I feel that Gravatars are once again the way to go for bloggers and are a good way to support WordPress. It is now fully integrated with WordPress.com blogs and I look for this to spill over into WordPress self-hosted blogs in the future, now that Automattic is supporting it. If you don’t already have one, you can get a Gravatar account here. You’ll want to use whatever e-mail address in the e-mail field that you use with your Gravatar account so that it will pull the Gravatar properly (it is case sensitive, so use all lower-case).
  • Categories and Tags – These are now wrapped into the post meta data section, so you can click to view them for the post, but they are out of the way if you don’t care about them.
  • Site Navigation – In the menu on the right, you can now view most navigation information by clicking the tabs next to the popular posts section. This way they are available for people looking for them, but also out of the way for everyone else. The other tabs are Top Commentators, Categories, and Archives. This also removes the need for having this stuff clogging up the footer of the blog.
  • Alternate shading – Post comments now alternate between white and a little shaded blue to add a little separation.

Subtractions

  • Web 2.0 Icons – I’ve removed most of the social bookmarking icons as my research showed that people don’t use them. Most people have a bookmarklet or browser button to use these services. In its place I will be leaving the ShareThis plugin and a option to click over and leave a comment. We’ll see if this works better.
  • Google AdSense blocks will now only appear after two days on single post pages so regular readers/commentators won’t have to see them.

It will be interesting to see how this theme change influences advertising and Google AdSense clicks, etc. The 125×125 banners now stand out a little better and I think ads will now (hopefully) perform better. I’ve also got some other ideas for it, but I didn’t get them done in time for today’s targeted launch, so those may be coming in the future.

I’m off to get ready for the new year, but I hope everyone has a happy and safe new year, and thanks for reading Kyle’s Cove!

P.S. Questions, comments and rude remarks are encouraged, so let me know what you think of the change(s)! What do you like better? What don’t you like?