In my series on starting a blog last year, I explained that, even though I was using TypePad as the platform for my blogs, I would recommend WordPress to anybody starting a new blog for a few different reasons. Well, after thinking about it, I figured I'd like to take advantage of the same benefits so made the decision to migrate Tech for Luddites to WordPress.

And as long as I was going to do the work required to move to a new platform (actually, it was less of a hassle than I expected), I decided it would also be a good time to make some changes to the design as well. I didn't want to do a complete overhaul because I didn't want to confuse my readers and, frankly, I generally liked the look of the old one. But here are some of the things you may notice if you're checking out the new site. If you have any feedback about what you find—good, bad, or you-know-what—please send it along.

Two-Column Design
I had originally designed the site with three columns—one for the main content and two sidebars—because I could get more links above the fold. However, the tradeoffs were that the main column was so skinny, you had to scroll a lot to read the whole post and it was occasionally a limitation if I wanted to post some content, like screenshots and videos, that were wider.

Also, I had to make the text in the sidebars fairly small so link titles didn't wrap over too many lines that I didn't think they stood out that well, which kind of negated the advantage of having more of them higher. So, in addition to using a larger font now, I've added boxes around groupings of links, which I think improves the readability as well.

Home Page Layout
When I moved the blog to WordPress, I had to pick a new underlying theme and I ended up going with Thesis, a premium theme used by many well-known blogs, including such diverse ones as Copyblogger, Chris Brogan, and Cute Overload.

One of the things I really like about the theme is its approach to the home page design, where you can set a certain number of posts as featured (meaning the post goes all the way across the column) and the rest as teasers, where excerpts are shown in two columns. For the time being, I've decided to just go with one featured post and make the rest of them teasers, because this seems to me like a good way to highlight the most recent post while still making it easy to scan earlier ones so you can find more posts of interest faster. I may end up changing this as I work with it more, and depending on any feedback I receive, but I definitely like the general approach.

Sharing Options
The use of social media and social bookmarking sites has grown a lot in just the one year that Tech for Luddites has been in existence, so I wanted to make sharing posts you find helpful easier. Now at the bottom of each post is a line of icons that link to a number of popular services as well as one to e-mail a link to the post to your friends.

There are a couple of other things as well, but I'll be addressing them in separate posts. In the meantime, I hope you enjoy T4L's new 'do and, if you have the inclination, I'd love it if you would add a comment below or send me an e-mail to let me know what you think—either way! :)

Posted in Blogging, My Two Cents, Social Media, Thesis, User Interface