San Diego Blog gets a Facelift

***We’ve been getting some visits for plastic surgery related terms. If you’re looking for a facelift in San Diego there are some links on that site. ***

First things first, we’re not done. There will be modifications the next 3-5 days, but hopefully the brunt of it is over with no downtime whatsoever.

So, let’s get to the good stuff. In my opinion, probably the coolest thing about our new design/theme (which we custom hacked together from a few other ideas) is that contributors have their own archive page now. They can also login to their account and update their “About yourself” area which will show up on your author’s (archive) page. You can also grab an RSS feed that will only show posts made by that particular author.

Now, aside from that, we obviously tightened things up a bit and went with a fixed layout. The old theme was a little hard to work with, and we had some ads and stuff sort of floating around aimlessly. There’s still a little clutter, which we’ll work to cleanup by arranging things better… but all-in-all I think it’s a solid improvement making the site more navigable.

Now, we’ve also incorporated a few banner spots. The hope with this is that if the site can pick up a handful of paid sponsors we can offer a stipend to a few motivated San Diego interns to pick up the flow of posts. It would be tremendous if we had at least 3-5 daily posts (quality); whereas now we’re at something like an average of one post every 3 or 4 days. Also, having some interns that are semi-compensated should help us to grow the number of “content-rich” posts we have, as opposed to some of the more “drive-by” style ones which are mostly a one-liner and a link drop (nothing wrong with that… but I’m sure everyone agrees that to grow we need those and more comprehensive discussion starters).

Oh, and on a user-friendliness note, we felt that drastically changing the layout of the actual post pages themselves would greatly enhance the readability. Now, there are no side-columns or really anything below the header to distract the reader from just reading the post. The comment area is large as well and trackbacks have been segregated into their own bordered area as well. We added a number of icons which bring a little life to the pages and help the eyes focus from place to place.

Since we wanted to do this at night, so as not to disturb our valued readers, it’s now 1:25am (and I was up until 5am last night trying to pull this off, which didn’t happen) so I’m going to cut this short and just say there are two more things that should make things interesting:

1. There is now a box of related links under the comments area of each post. It’s created dynamically but it’s really rather accurate. It’s a great way to find other posts of interest based on what you’ve obviously just completed reading.
2. Lastly, above the blog post comment submission button we’ve now added a checkbox “Check here to get emailed when others leave a comment” which if you decide to place a checkmark in, will email you when subsequent comments are made. (will test this thoroughly tomorrow)

I’m sure there are a few other little mentionables but it’s late and I’m exhausted. Hope all the readers and participants on San Diego Blog feel this is an improvement or at least that we broke even if you’re the cranky type!

We welcome constructive criticism and any reports of bugs would be great!

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