Comments on: How to ReDesign a Blog [Part II]

By: Ryan Bickett

Ryan Bickett — Sun, 24 May 2009 18:27:43 +0000

Matt ~ Thanks for a great post. There’s a wealth of posts and information out there about how to setup basic sites utilizing Wordpress, but not enough that focus on the more advanced features and techniques.

This post is great in that it illustrates how you’ve pushed yourself to think “outside of the box” and come up with solutions that fit the needs of your client.

The techniques you’ve illustrated will come in handy in a project I am currently working. Additionally, your thoughts are inspiring as well!

Great job on the DPS website and your other work!

By: Web Development

Web Development — Thu, 12 Feb 2009 03:47:07 +0000

Got a simple solution for what i was looking for, WP multi-user for multiple blogs. Thanks a lot for yet another great article.

By: ilovephotoblogs

ilovephotoblogs — Sat, 24 Jan 2009 21:21:10 +0000

Matt..thanks for sharing the code as well as the thought process..I am in the process of doing the same thing, but was leaning towards option#1, however, as mentioned, the upkeep would be a nightmare. I was contemplating just using a separate page for each new section, with conditional statements to change the headers and give the appearance of a different site… and also paring down the sidebar to be more generic across all pages/sites..thanks for the guidance.

By: Paul

Paul — Sat, 24 Jan 2009 13:34:07 +0000

Thank you for the post and wordpress mu is something must to try

By: Cheap iPods

Cheap iPods — Sat, 24 Jan 2009 09:25:39 +0000

Great tips, and one of them answered a question that I had and could not find the answer to.

Thanks!

By: Shane Arthur

Shane Arthur — Fri, 23 Jan 2009 14:13:06 +0000

Matt,

Outstanding work. Just curious, though; did you tinker around with the redesign locally using something like WAMP, or did you test on a hidden subdirectory on the live server?

Regards
Shane
twitter: shanearthur

By: Pat

Pat — Fri, 23 Jan 2009 14:02:05 +0000

A great article Darren and very timely.

I’ did a SEO course last year and this year we pursuaded the lecturer to run another course and each week we look through what one member of the class has or is doing.

Last night was my turn and the consensus was that I’ve built up a reasonable level of traffic but am failing on conversion.

As I offer several photography services I need to somehow display information relevant to my viewer. Perhaps through running a survey on the front page – not sure how I’m going to do this yet. Your idea for displaying recent posts from a particular catergory though looks like a great place to start though and not too difficult to implement.

I’ll have to check your archives if you’ve covered running serveys and how to gather data from these :-)

A very technical article but really really useful!

Pat
PatB Photography

By: Make Money Online Tips

Make Money Online Tips — Fri, 23 Jan 2009 13:48:03 +0000

A good continuation about Redesigning. Clarifies many things. Should be helpful if your a designer and surely helpful even if your not a designer.

By: uwak

uwak — Fri, 23 Jan 2009 10:01:43 +0000

thanks for great learning to be new designer in a minutes….

By: JOE GELB

JOE GELB — Fri, 23 Jan 2009 02:02:54 +0000

it looks like you did a good job with digital photography school. i recently shifted a wordpress them that had dynamic widgets and page links on top which made the design much easier than many templates that seem to get many people into the blogging dead end where they have to do alot to change the site.

By: Corey Freeman

Corey Freeman — Fri, 23 Jan 2009 00:49:18 +0000

Everything runs so smoothly it’s easy to forget the massive amount of work that went into it. Sometimes bits of complicated code are necessary to make things run smoothly. I have a complex project going on at the moment as well and you’ve given me some awesome ideas! Great job, really.

By: Kelvin Kao

Kelvin Kao — Thu, 22 Jan 2009 23:22:01 +0000

I am glad to read about the trade-offs and how you did your conditionals. While I haven’t created a theme from scratch, I’ve modified it many times to display things differently utilizing the categories. I had to do a bunch of conditionals too. No problem. The only thing that’s a little annoying is that, if I ever want to add or remove a category, I’ll have to go fix those conditional statements as well.

By: Todd Austin

Todd Austin — Thu, 22 Jan 2009 20:53:30 +0000

Alexander: Nope. Not an adblock problem. I actually contacted Matt Brett and let him know, and it is fixed now.

By: Kayla

Kayla — Thu, 22 Jan 2009 18:07:29 +0000

Great tips, and thats for the useful resources. I agree the sidebar is the toughest part…I know it will be for my next design. The widgetizing just makes things harder, but I guess it also makes things easier in the end…

By: WPCult

WPCult — Thu, 22 Jan 2009 17:44:15 +0000

Very nice article!

By: Ben

Ben — Thu, 22 Jan 2009 17:38:19 +0000

This post was a very interesting read, Thanks!

By: Dave

Dave — Thu, 22 Jan 2009 17:35:05 +0000

Great article, the tutorial on adding the custom fields in the admin was extremely useful. My question though, is how did you get it to show more than one field?

By: Alexander

Alexander — Thu, 22 Jan 2009 17:01:56 +0000

Todd_Austin: They look fine in FireFox for me, maybe your blocking them in someway with a FireFox add-on like Adblock or something similar.

By: SEO Tips

SEO Tips — Thu, 22 Jan 2009 16:44:44 +0000

Another great article :)

I ve never thought about using Wordpress MU but I am considering it now, it seems quite a good software.

By: Ryan Gladstone

Ryan Gladstone — Thu, 22 Jan 2009 16:32:25 +0000

thanks for the tip about WordPress MU. I needed that!