After long weeks of considerations and hesitations, I’ve decided to join other great bloggers and purchased Thesis. As you can see, the design is still dull and a bit boring at this stage. Please be patient while I tweak the theme to be (hopefully) better than before.
The main reasons I bought Thesis is because of the SEO so I’m hoping to be able to see some good results coming out of this. If not, I guess I still have that 30 days money back guarantee and revert back to my old theme 
But I guess after the tweakings for the next few weeks, I don’t think I’ll scrap all that and go back to my old theme.
{ 32 comments… read them below or add one }
Mike,
Congrats on the new theme. Hope this will bring you traffic, success and $
All the best!
Thanks, Nihar. More search engine visitors == more $$ hopefully
Congrats Michael! Good going, but your thesis appears different than the Default theme…Thats good!
Hey Rohit. Well it’s been tweaked a little bit, but I hate the sidebar area..it’s too.. “white”. Will do more customizations along the way
Congratulations at one thought you will never move from Arthemia
I’m sure you going to love it!!
Haha I know. During the first few hours (and til now), I’m still missing my Arthemia theme. Maybe not until I’ve customized it further that I’ll forget about Arthemia
Well, lets see what you can come up with. Curious to see what you do and how.
Use the theme and see what you can style better than others.
BTW, CommentLuv is not working at all. just went back to this comment to edit and let you know.
Thanks George. I don’t know much about CSS unfortunately. So I’ve been relying on other people’s work and been copy-pasting their CSS/Hooks here
Wish I’m a Designer Guru or something
Hm, I’ll have a look at the CommentLuv tomorrow, it’s almost 1 a.m here. Thanks for letting me know!
Oh no! It’s losing Technology style..
Don’t worry, it will be again once I make some adjustments
Some many things happen lately. Previously, you changed to new domain, now changed to new theme. Wish the best to you.
I know, man
I’m confident it’s for the better!
Congrats on the new theme!
According to what I am reading from several websites about the new google Caffiene update, website rankings will be partially based on how fast it loads. It may be a good idea to improve performance in that area as well. Optimize the template
Really? Well lots of people say that Google bots like Thesis’ structure too. So hopefully it’s not just a marketing gimmick
So you are in thesis circle now. Wait the report how good thesis affect your blog.
Dana @ Online Knowledge´s last blog ..Big No Thanks in Thanks Giving
Hehe yeah, I never thought that I’ll join the circle. I’ll definitely keep an eye on whether Thesis affects my blog
Urrghhh… everything so much… bigger and “clumsier”… bright white and… Times New Roman… hahaha, but at least I see my opinion is shared by you – hope you customize it a bit so it isn’t “dull and a bit boring”.
So just what exactly does in offer in terms of SEO optimization that makes it so popular (and worth the money, though I’d have thought you would’ve gotten it from RapidShare after tipping me off about that awesome service
).
Another question: is it just that the Thesis theme is similar to Arthemia, that it has the same homepage layout with the little boxes for recent posts and just a general similar layout or did you customize it that way?
Nah, I bought it from the Thesis site
Well, that was why I hesitated. The SEO optimizations: like the H1, H2 tags mostly being done on other themes already or an SEO function included can easily be replaced with the All in one SEO plug-in. But somehow lots of bloggers claiming that they get better rankings in Google and stuff. I’m not sure whether they said it because they wanted to get some affiliate sales or whether it really is the truth. I’m going to find out soon
The Thesis theme’s default is not similar to Arthemia but since I’ve fallen in love with my old theme, I tweaked it to look like one
I’m gonna answer backwards here…
Yeah, I thought you tweaked it, and I’m glad, I really like this small but convenient way of showing recent posts… or browsing through the archives… can you tweak it more to show the number of comments of each post though, just like with Armethia? I’ve gotten used to that, and it sucks how it only shows the title and “Read full post” link now. =(
It’s also nice that you know how to tweak code, I know a bit too, but it’s more a copy and paste, guess and check (or should I say: guess, save, and preview site haha) game when I’m editing code. Most of the time it works, mostly cause I’m so persistent in getting the theme exactly how I want, that I eventually find a way to make it look like that. Ahh, perhaps I should focus more on posts rather than the perfect theme no? What a great topic to write about when I do post haha!
Yep, it will certainly be nice to see (hopefully) positive changes occur in when you next month’s stats come in (though you check them every day anyway, right?
). The H1 trick is a good one, but like you said, with a bit of tweaking it can be done in any theme. It’s a shame how this theme, even if it is much more SEO optimized, is so… bare. Hope you “decorate” it a little before Christmas hehe!
Also, the “newest post” look doesn’t work… again, I’m sure when you have time you’ll probably tweak it around so it’s more pleasing to the eyes and looks more professional, but I really like the thumbnail + black bg + little excerpt that you had before for the newest post (unless that was a featured post section…)
Can you edit your Edit Comment Ajax plug-in to have more time to edit comments… like 10 or 15 minutes instead of just five? No one usually replies in that short amount of time, and it’d be much easier for me to edit my comments and add more stuff…
EDIT: I also feel that the if you add how much comments each post has to the little boxes, it’ll show the interaction between the blogger and the visitors and incite more people to participate in the discussion. Just my thoughts.
EDITEDIT: Also, I wanted to mention that usually I don’t look too much at the theme/template of a blog if the content interests me, but being a regular visitors and used to the nice previous interface… yeah…
Yeah, I miss lots of things from the Arthemia Premium to be honest
. I hope the traffic later justifies this change. I’ll add that comments in later, thanks. Didn’t know people actually love to see that as much as I do.
I’ve changed the Edit Comment Ajax timeout to be 30 minutes. I don’t think I’ve ever seen anyone comment as much as you, lol (a compliment, by the way)
I’m not an expert at CSS so I can only copy paste, change a few things and see what happens
So I hope that I can turn this theme into something more beautiful in the future…..
You’re right, more traffic will come, but to make it stay, it’s nice to have an appealing layout as well – it’s like blog posts that have no images at all… organized… maybe… but not half as interesting and appealing to the reader. Anyway, I know you’ll do your best, just cause it’s your blog and you’d obviously want to make it look nice, if at least for yourself! (it seems to me that often bloggers are the ones who visit their blog the most haha)
Since Thesis seems to be such a popular theme, I’m sure there’ll be more than a few tutorials on how to spice it up into something pretty.
Thank you. I guess it comes from forums lol! I think it’s the guarantee that I know that you will probably reply and keep the discussion alive and that you are a real person, not some online robot that motivates me to comment.
Haha I guess the feeling is mutual. It’s good to know someone who really cares about you/your blog rather than a bot (or even a human “bot”) who only knows how to say “It’s a good post”
Aha! Date text, comments link, and a black box for featured posts.
I like the changes! 
Thanks to you
and somehow I love looking at my own blog now.. I think it looks much better now. Oh, don’t worry..plenty of tweaking still needs to be done here and there!
I kinda like how the featured box is “fluid” instead of “fixed” and stretches across the whole page. It looks like an introduction or About page for the blog – very integrated and catches your attention right away (good choice for featured post too
)
Glad you like it
Hi, I just looked at the new site and said ‘hmm.’ Although it’s better in some ways (increase in font size, better readability, clear spacing), I feel that there are lots of things which could be improved. First of all the navigation menu should be below the site header, that’s the normal – and conventional – place. It’s where the eye is searching for it. Instead I found some Google Ads! I wasn’t pleased. Then I saw the nav menu butting up against the top. At least let the nav menu padding be 1.0.
Next, the sidebar. Black and cream mixed. It doesn’t look as right to me. Either have full black or full cream. The current colour scheme doesn’t look as neat.
The blending of the featured post is nice, although I would like it to be a little less prominent. Love the new font. This one is much more readable than the old one. Also I can now read the comments clearly. Good to see the magazine layout is still there, and the Page 1 of so-and-so. I love that feature.
Sorry, but it’s not very good-looking to me. The immediate thing that needs to be done is to get the nav menu below the header. Currently it’s at the far top where the eye doesn’t see at the first glance. Please do something about it.
Hope you found these tips helpful. It was not my intention to be very harsh about the Thesis Theme (I actually think it’s great seeing by the videos at the official site!), just to give some constructive criticism for a better design.
Idrees
Hi Idrees, thank you so much for your honest critical comment.
Thesis theme by default put the navbar on the top. I found it weird at first but somehow I like it so I didn’t move it below the header. I guess it’s more like a matter of personal preference (I hope)
As for the sidebar, believe it or not, I tried changing a few colors but didn’t find the perfect one (the background on the Categories panel). If you have a good suggestion on a color, I’d love to hear it
Maybe I should change it to white instead?
“Maybe I should change it to white instead?”
Not my opinion. That would be very bright. But if you like it you can always do it.
How about making the sidebar a full cream colour and no black? Or even better, you could change the colour scheme of the whole website, maybe changing the brown or dark grey to dark blue or green. The current colour scheme is a bit dull.
Regards,
Idrees
Believe me, I tried. I actually went to those website color schemes and try a few good ones. Somehow ended up back to the grayish theme *sigh*
I’ll try revisiting the color set again one day