Finally, a new theme. Although I liked the old Lightbreaker theme, I’d been wanting to move away from it for some time. After researching WordPress themes for quite a long time (free and paid) I finally decided to go with the this one, Arthemia Premium (there is an excellent free version as well, which can be found here).
It took a lot of customization and a lot of time to get this theme to where I want it to be, and in fact I am using a smaller sub-set of the features that this theme has to offer, but I am happy with it
The main impetus behind the switch is that for some time now I’ve been wanting something that could better make use of all the content that my site has accumulated over the years. Although the “wordiness” and length of my posts is in many ways what makes this blog unique, I always had a suspicion that, assaulted with a wall of words, many (most) readers are generally speaking less likely to engage and less likely to be able to quickly find what they are looking for and/or find content that they actually may be interested in. (I’d also considered changing my format to short, more frequent posts, but decided against it.
The other thing that I wanted was some sort of “featured articles” widget on top, and now I have one!
Let me know what you guys think. If you are interested in buying this theme for your own WordPress site use the banner below to do so!
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much nicer and cleaner – good choice!
Clicking on the comment link seems to cause a post to break. Only the header and footer show up at that point. In Firefox 3.0.10 and IE8. It seems to load and then collapses in on itself and disappears with a redirect.
Other than that, it looks good.
Yes, much nicer on the eyes. Did you ever look at the eye movement studies I mentioned a few months ago? The most active position is upper left, then scanning to the right, then down the left column. Please put the new software entries in teh prime spot and move the other stuff to the right. The new software listings, which are the meat of this site, would benefit more by being in the prime location. They’re barely visible on launching the site now. Still, the color scheme and clean lines are much, much nicer.
I like the new design a lot! It’s more straight forward and easier to overlook. Just a small thing: I find the links are barely visible unless you mouse-over them: This is only true for the main site (before clicking on “read full story). You might want to make them be spotted easier there as well by underscoring them as well? And: I generally dislike captchas, because computers (e.g. spambots) tend to “read” them better than humans. It always makes me think of this article: http://www.oddee.com/item_96665.aspx
Best regards, Ruceb
I’m a little disappointed it isn’t free… If it were free that would be something special.
Thanks for not shortening the posts! New theme looks good. Kind of ironic that the freeware genius is using a paid theme though.
Monsieur Samer,
Votre site est très lisible, très visuel, avec cet nouveau thème de présentation.
Your site is very readable, very visual, with this new theme of presentation.
It’s clear, catchy, well balanced and easy to scan through.
Long live Freewaregenius! And many returns to the Says family. ( wink, wink )
Looks cool, congrats man!
I like!
Glad you like it guys!
I found quite a few problems/issues though that I’m trying to fix (I am at a loss as to why the comments links are broken and how to go about fixing them.
@Fred: what “new software listings” do you mean? The recent posts section? I need to take another look at those studies you sent, except when I tried to unzip the file I got numerous errors.
@Jason: there’s a terriffic free version of this theme. The link again is: http://michaelhutagalung.com/2008/05/arthemia-magazine-blog-wordpress-theme-released/
@Ruceb: the Captcha has actually lowered my SPAM comments by 80% or so. True.
@tbcii: its because I want only the best for my audience. The theme is actually quite affordable ($50 or so).
@Anonymous: I got the “says” family joke. Are you “jfjb”?, the guy from Florida who writes fiction? If so, check out this posting, it may be right up your ally!
it’s far more better than the previous theme especially for my very very low speed. it load faster for me.
thanks
@Samer,
If I disable javascript in my browser, the comments link works fine. The link actually works until the page finishes loading. At that point, it “redirects” to the “broken” page. The behavior’s timing leads me to believe the problem exists with the function in the body onload statement.
Looks like the catmenu.js is gonna need a revisiting. Let me know if there’s any way I can assist.
Great choice Sammer!
Always wondered why you kept the older one. Too dark though kind of special.
You are among our favs, maybe you know it.
Keep the great work!
Marc – 4 Free Team
At least there’s no stupid Obama “CHANGE” banner. That’s a huge improvement.
It was almost deja vu when I came here. The theme looked familiar yet different. Lone behold I find out this is the premium version of the theme I changed to a couple of months back. It is a small world. Excellent theme isn’t it? Grats!
@Samer, I’ll post an updated version of the eye motion studies and send you an email with the link if RapidShare won’t let me overwrite the existing file. The logo and banner take up almost 2/3 of the screen on my widescreen laptop (1280×768, I think.) That’s a lot of lost space. Yes, I meant the recent posts. The basic idea is that people look at the upper left first so that’s where the most dynamic elements of the site should exist. SnapFiles does something similar, they force the user to page down quite a bit to find the new entries. Both SnapFile and freewaregenius look horrible with the borwser thumbnail views because you can’t see if there is new content. techbargains does this as well. I’d think you could push the banner stuff to the right column and play with font sizes and, perhaps, column widths, to have a more glance-friendly design. Love the color scheme. The grey clearly defines areas without demanding too much attention. Bravo!
@ Samer
Yes, it is me, jfjb.
Good memory, Samer.
The CAPTCHA didn’t work at once so i reloaded the page, retyped the code, pressed ‘summit’ and then saw my name/email had been switched to the default Anonymous — although my message was still intact… anyway, it was too late to correct.
I’ll look into StoryBook.
I used Dramatica in the days. Didn’t like it too well and it was EXPENSIVE.
I was thinking, Samer, about your new theme environment: how easy or not would it be to give the user the option of viewing 10-30-50 entries per screen load?
I’ve seen this being used on the Mozilla add-ons site (5-10-20-50-100), or Powell’s (10-25-100-250). Abebooks does a good job with 30 entries.
Food for thoughts, some of us a fast-readers and slow clickers ( wink ).
P.S. Let me check the time stamp again here: it’s 16:36 in Florida.
I would recommend separating comments from pingbacks as well. A pingback in the middle of comments is disruptive and doesn’t add to the conversation.
@jfjb: that would be quite difficult, I believe. I will look into it to see if there may be a WordPress plugin that delivers this functionality, but I doubt very much (anyway these pages are all cached to lighten the load on the server).
@Jason: that’s something that I miss about the old theme (seperating comments from Pingbacks). I looked into it and it doesn’t seem to be too hard to implement. Will add to my to-do list.
Thanks guys for your input
brighter than before i guess…
great theme