Richard Hayes
Addicted
After very long weekend of working behind the scenes, I am pleased to launch our fantastic new look. The new theme called Quantive has been made by the team from Rocket Theme, who specialize in fantastic looking themes for WordPress, Joomla and phpBB. The new theme is powered by Gantry and has allowed me to make the theme look and behave how I want it too and together with the crisp graphics I feel that I have managed to achieve our goal.
The original theme was a temporary one as I did not want to invest in a theme that would put me out of pocket if the site was not going to take off but as we have seen so far this month the site has been doing very well, according to our Awstats the site has had over 1,000 unique hits already this month. After having the blog reviewed recently and having scored a 94% I felt it was time to make the step and sort the theme out. After a lot of planning and behind the scenes testing I went with Quantive as it offered not only the look I wanted but also the clean lines and modern feel as well.
Unlike normal WordPress themes Rocket Themes are powered by a software called Gantry and to put it in simple terms is a software on top of WordPress. So not only did I have to plan the new layout, add the widgets but I also had to learn how to use gantry and the plugins that came with the new theme such as the RokStories (this is the new feature on the home page). There is so much you can do to the style it was mind blowing at first and having a few test sites behind the scenes helped to get everything planned and changed over before it went live. The theme was also selected for another reason as well but without revealing too much we do plan on expanding the site with a new feature in the not too distant future.
So what has changed then, well let me explain starting with the home page. Firstly I did not want to go for the boring main panel and side panel so the whole layout on the home page is different. The layout is as follows; Main section with the RokStories plugin controlling all the latest news. Then followed by the 3 box to give new visitors info about our site and main subjects. Then the site splits into 3 columns on with the last 5 blog posts, then the middle column has the latest posts and comments then the far right has the archives and categories plus the feed from Brickset so we never miss any news. I still have to tweak this section at little as there is a few more widgets I would like to add to it. After this comes our advertising section that is the same on all pages, followed by the tags and our new flickr gallery (this will be up and running fully in next few days).
For the rest of the site I kept with just one side panel with the same widgets as before, I did however had to find a few new ones as the ones on the old theme did not work with this one. Every page, section and post has been checked but should you find any issues please can you use the contact page to let us know. Please also leave you thoughts on the new look and if you want to know more about either our new partners RocketTheme or Gantry then click the links in the footer.
Visit our new look site today
The original theme was a temporary one as I did not want to invest in a theme that would put me out of pocket if the site was not going to take off but as we have seen so far this month the site has been doing very well, according to our Awstats the site has had over 1,000 unique hits already this month. After having the blog reviewed recently and having scored a 94% I felt it was time to make the step and sort the theme out. After a lot of planning and behind the scenes testing I went with Quantive as it offered not only the look I wanted but also the clean lines and modern feel as well.
Unlike normal WordPress themes Rocket Themes are powered by a software called Gantry and to put it in simple terms is a software on top of WordPress. So not only did I have to plan the new layout, add the widgets but I also had to learn how to use gantry and the plugins that came with the new theme such as the RokStories (this is the new feature on the home page). There is so much you can do to the style it was mind blowing at first and having a few test sites behind the scenes helped to get everything planned and changed over before it went live. The theme was also selected for another reason as well but without revealing too much we do plan on expanding the site with a new feature in the not too distant future.
So what has changed then, well let me explain starting with the home page. Firstly I did not want to go for the boring main panel and side panel so the whole layout on the home page is different. The layout is as follows; Main section with the RokStories plugin controlling all the latest news. Then followed by the 3 box to give new visitors info about our site and main subjects. Then the site splits into 3 columns on with the last 5 blog posts, then the middle column has the latest posts and comments then the far right has the archives and categories plus the feed from Brickset so we never miss any news. I still have to tweak this section at little as there is a few more widgets I would like to add to it. After this comes our advertising section that is the same on all pages, followed by the tags and our new flickr gallery (this will be up and running fully in next few days).
For the rest of the site I kept with just one side panel with the same widgets as before, I did however had to find a few new ones as the ones on the old theme did not work with this one. Every page, section and post has been checked but should you find any issues please can you use the contact page to let us know. Please also leave you thoughts on the new look and if you want to know more about either our new partners RocketTheme or Gantry then click the links in the footer.
Visit our new look site today
