New Site Theme

Posted by Kirby Turner on February 16, 2015

I’ve been on a website redesign kick lately updating sites such as kirbyturner.com and rowanturner.net. The recent update to my vanity website gives it a more modern look, and Rowan’s website now has a clean, fresh look that focuses on the content.

I especially like Rowan’s new site design. It uses a responsive design site theme so it looks good on the desktop as well as on mobile devices. I also like how it has custom header images for posts, and the clean and simply layout for posts makes it easy to focus on the content in each post. I like the site design for Rowan’s website so much that I decided to use the same site theme here at thecave.

I couldn’t, however, use the site theme as is. thecave is a bit more involved given that it uses categories. Plus, I want to provide a complete archive of every post available. These are things not found on Rowan’s site, so I’ve spent the last couple of evenings tweaking the site theme to be more appropriate for thecave.com.

Other changes I made include adding a footer to each page that shows recent articles and a link list to other sites that I run, and adding an archive link to the top that gives you access to every post made here since 2002. There is also a categories link in the top bar for those who would rather find an article based on a category. But the change that I like the most is the rotating header images for each post.

The original site theme lets me pick a header image for a new post, and if I do not specify a header image then the default header image is used. This works but it felt a bit boring to me. I want to see other header images when reading through old posts, not the same one over and over. So I tweaked the theme to pick the header image, when not specified, by performing a modulus operation on the day of the month. It’s not random, but it’s also not boring. Now as you page through posts you will see different header images1.

I have more work I want to do to this site such as adding an RSS feed for each category. Actually the site has had a feed file for each category for years. I just haven’t made the URL to the category feed files obvious. But that should be easier to do now that there is a page dedicated to listing all the categories.

So there you have it…the new site theme for thecave.com. Let me know what you think2.

  1. I made the same change to the theme on Rowan’s website. Now you can see more fun pictures of Rowan as you read through the posts. ↩

  2. You will find links to me on various social networks such as App.net and Twitter below in the page footer. ↩

Posted in personal. Tagged in blog, web.

Related Articles