While producing quality content is our main task at hand, we do like to stir things up on the design and presentation front from now and then. The theme you’ve been seeing for the past 11 months was our third iteration, and we really like it. We’re not going to change it (not just yet anyway). However, there were certain design aspects that we thought could be made better, as well as performance issues that put an extra load on our server as well as the end user. So we’ve been working on a new codebase along with minor refinements in the design and presentation.
We went with Thesis.
Thesis is this brilliant base theme made by Chris Pearson at DIYThemes. It’s feature rich, allows extremely painless customisations, can be updated without breaking your current design, and most of all, is super fast. In fact, Beautiful Pixels is already powered by Thesis. There are visual changes as well. The sidebar is smoother, slimmer; the linked items now get a polished look; some of you might not have noticed, but the old theme was using Arial as its base font—we’re going with Helvetica now.
Most of all, we hope you like it. We’re always open to feedback, so either leave us a comment or shoot an email to pr [att] smokingapples [dott] com. Now, back to publishing some awesome articles we’ve been working on. – Team SA.
{ 7 comments… read them below or add one }
Like the small changes! Looks great!
However, there are some minor issues:
The text is not vertically aligned inside the input Elements for commenting in Firefox. Try using line-height: 29 px;
Also there is a tiny border arround .entry-content, don’t know if this is by purpose…
Thank you for your work! I enjoy it!
Thanks Elean. If it’s not too much trouble, could you send me (milind@smokingapples.com) screenshots of the errors you talk about?
looking good and feels faster too!
1. Did you do the thesis customization yourself ? How difficult was it to port the previous design into thesis ?
2. Bought the regular version or developer version ?
3. I’m not sure. But I think there was a subscription option in the comments earlier
Thanks Manu.
1. Yes. Difficulty is subjective, right?
2. Don’t know. Preshit was the one who took care of that. I think it was developer (since we used it on BP as well).
3. We disabled all plugins and are slowly re-enabling them—site crashed when we first moved in the theme. Enabled the subscribe option.
One of the best customizations of Thesis I have seen. Nice!
Thanks! Means a lot coming from you.
Great new look – and very smart to go with Thesis. I use it as a base for every site I design / build these days. Also, I’m a huge Helvetica fan