No, not for this site. Haven’t you been paying attention to my sporadic posting here?

The new theme for The Coolest Gifts is now up and running. Go take a look. Do you love it? I sure do!

Let’s have a quick comparison between the old and the new…

THE OLD THEME:

THE NEW THEME:

Sweet, right?

Believe it or not, there’s double the number of posts displayed on the page now. Instead of having the 10 most recent posts, I have the 20 most recent because I’m using 125×125 thumbnails to represent each post.

But I’m getting ahead of myself. Here’s how it went down…

The Idea

My thought process behind the design went something like this…I’ve always admired the design of some of the larger t-shirt sites (Busted Tees and Snorg Tees, for example). They’re very clean and simple, and everything is right where you’d expect it to be. It’s a huge contrast from a LOT of blogs, which tend to be extremely cluttered with content and ads all over the place.

Since The Coolest Gifts is a blog about products (and since every single post will be about a different product), I decided I wanted my site to look like the combination of 1) a normal blog and 2) one of the above-mentioned t-shirt sites.

After thinking about it for a while, and doing some preliminary sketches on paper, I came up with the layout for the homepage. It would have 125×125 images (like an ecommerce site) that represent the individual posts and take up the majority of the page, but it would also have a widget-ready sidebar on the left (like a blog).

As for the single post pages, I again drew inspiration from the t-shirt sites, and decided to have a 400×400 image in every single post, where I would place the image of the product. The description would be to the right.

I also knew that I wanted to have a list of Similar Items, Popular Posts, and room for Direct Ads. Because visuals are at least as important (if not more so) than text on this site, I dediced that I wanted 3 rows of 125×125 images to represent those 3 groups. I also thought that it would be great for advertisers, since their 125×125 ads, while clearly labeled as such, would blend right in with my content and add to the site, rather than distract from it.

Once I knew what I wanted, I opened Photoshop to make some mockups. Now I should stress that I have almost no Photoshop skills…it’s entirely self-taught and a lot of trial-and-error. So while I knew that these mockups would be far from perfect, I wanted to have something visual to show to whoever was going to be doing the coding. The images of my mockups are below.

Now that I had the concept and the design outlined, I needed to find somebody who could make it a reality. I put up a job request on jobs.wordpress.net and Elance. I also filled out price quote forms at some of the more well-known WordPress design companies online. I had a lot of people contact me from the jobs.wordpress.net posting, I got prompt price quotes from the companies I contacted, and I got had one response to my Elance posting (in fairness, I might have had more, but I ended the posting within about 2 days). In the end, I chose to use the bidder from Elance (Adevox, which just so happens to be a design firm from Romania) for a number of reasons…

• Reputation (they had 100% positive feedback on Elance with almost $100k in earnings)
• Experience (they showed me some examples in their portfolio which gave me confidence they’d be able to do this one)
• Terms (I could use Elance’s escrow system, which would ensure that I didn’t get ripped off)
• Price (incredibly, it was the same or lower than everybody else!)

Once we agreed to the Business Terms, they gave me a detailed questionnaire which I answered and quickly returned. A day or two later, they sent me mockups (much better looking than the ones I made!). I loved the way they looked, but I had a few changes for them, which they took care of the very next day. I approved ‘em, and they got to work on turning the images into a theme.

3 or 4 days later, they had a working demo for me hosted on their servers. Oh it was so fun to play with! There were a few things that needed to be changed and we went back and forth for a few days until they were fixed.

My Concept Of The Homepage:

The Finished Homepage:

My Concept Of The Single Post Page:

The Finished Single Post Page:

After some testing and tweaking, it’s now live!

Just a few weeks ago, this theme was nothing but a concept in my head. It’s so exhilarating and gratifying to see it up and running, and looking even better than I had imagined.

An Eye Towards The Future

One other thing that I have in the back of my mind (waaaaaaay in the back) is that I could sell the occasional product of my own with this site. It’s possible that, if I get my hands on some awesome products wholesale, I could post about it as usual, but instead of linking to a product page, use the “Buy It Here” image to link directly to a PayPal payment form.

Another potential direction that I can do with is to add on to the site by having a full fledged ecommerce store (perhaps at shop.thecoolestgifts.com) and use the blog part of it to feature my own products

To be clear, I have no definitive plans in place to do either of those things, and if they do happen they’ll probably be at least a few years down the road. But it’s really nice to know that I’m already positioning myself for future expansion in a way that will fit in with my existing site, and feel like a natural product extension to my readers.

One Thing’s Still Missing

Can you guess what it is? If you said a great logo, you’re correct. What you see now is a simple logo that I made myself. Logo design was never part of my deal with them, because it made it cheaper, and I would rather spend that part of my budget by outsourcing that job to a logo designer. I’m not in a huge rush with that, but expect it to be done by the end of March.

Okay…Time For Me To Get Moving!

I think it’s only fitting that “The Coolest Gifts” has the coolest theme, and now that it’s live I’m really going to start putting everything I have into providing great content and promoting the site as much as I possibly can.

So What Do You Think?

Go ahead, the floor is yours. Be brutally honest…I can take it!

Tags: coolestgifts, custom, custom theme, the coolest gifts, theme

This entry was posted on Friday, March 7th, 2008 at 4:22 pm and is filed under Websites. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.