Cleaning up the Blog Clutter – A Fresh Look

If you’re a regular visitor to this blog, you’ll notice that the coding pad has a new look! I spent some time this past weekend rethinking the look and feel of this blog and deciding on what changes to make to create a better and cleaner visitor experience. I liked the old look a lot, but it was time for a change.

When I went theme searching, I was looking a theme with the following features:

• Clean and uncluttered, simple color scheme
• Support for threaded comments
• Support for Gravatars in comments
• Nice simple ad spots

After spending a lot of time browsing through different themes, I finally settled on the Cutline theme (3 ColumnsRight) by Chris Pearson. This has always been one of my favorite themes and I’ve been using it on my personal blog for the longest time.

The Cutline theme is simple and uncluttered, with a clean white background and a general lack of frills, which I like :), and it supports threaded comments and gravatars which was important to me.  While the Cutline theme doesn’t come with the ad spots, I was able to add those without too much fuss. I decided to make them 175×175 for a better fit with the overall theme.  I may rethink that after a while but for now it works and gives my sponsors and partners good exposure.

Other changes:

• Added a second navigation under the header to point to selected categories.
• Changed the header images to a photo I took while hiking out in the Sourland Mountain Preserve in New Jersey.
• Removed the bulk of the adsense ads that were in the sidebar, leaving only the horizontal one under the header, and I may get rid of that one
• Added a Books I Recommend widget on the sidebar

I will continue to look at what changes to make.  My goal is to have the coding pad be a pleasant place to visit, where my readers can focus on the content and not be distracted by a lot of clutter.

Eventually, I hope to roll out my own theme, and make it exactly what I want it to be, but in the mean time, thank you Chris Pearson for the Cutline Theme 🙂