New Site Design (just in time for WordPress 2.6)

Wow, it’s been quite an eventful week here at Critiqal – and it’s only Tuesday! Not only did we update the site design once again, we apparently did it just in time for the new version of WordPress!

So why another change?

Glad you asked. Well, a couple of reasons prompted the site change this time. While we were really happy with the Structure theme by Justin Tadlock, it wasn’t exactly what we were looking for. The tabs were a nice touch (the knowledge of which eventually led to our “Coming Soon” accordion on the home page/main movie page).

However, there didn’t seem to be enough contrast to the theme (white on light blue). While this wasn’t a major problem, we also had been wanting to consolidate all the movie information into a little box at the top of the review/preview (ie. stars, director, studio, rating, dvd release, theatrical release, etc.). With the tabs, however, our info was so condensed, we didn’t have much else to add to the sidebar. We could have found more to add, of course, but why? We already so many plugins, why add more just to fill in unused space.

A third concern was our ad placement. We’ve been told time and time again that ads do best when placed at the top of the page (with top-right coming in second). On most of the pages, however, the ads were mostly beneath the fold (if they appeared on the page at all).

And then there was StudioPress

While this was all floating around in our minds, we started checking out the weekly theme releases over on weblogtoolscollection.com and, after a few weeks, stumbled across StudioPress by dailyblogtips.com, and were hooked.

While answering all of our concerns, it also allowed to add little extras that we had been thinking about. Among those, a redesign of the main movie page, setting a default image if no thumbnail was selected on a post and finally being able to get rid of a tag that is a category (WWE) by setting the post to display recent posts from that category instead of “No Related Posts” if no tags had been entered (these design tips coming “soon” in the WordPress Tips series – “soon” being a relative word, meaning as we get to them).

WordPress 2.6

And then to top it off, today we upgraded to WordPress 2.6. While it’s not as drastic of a change as the last update, the theme display split into pages is a nice touch, as is the cleaner Plugins page (now it’s split into “Active”, “Recently Active” and “Inactive”).

And now…

So there you have it – a new WordPress upgrade on the heels of a new site design. Is this Critiqal’s best week ever or what?

Enjoy, and feel free to drop a comment on what you think of the new design – and, of course, your suggestions for improvements for the future!

Happy surfing!