New blog theme – Binafsha 2.0

Salam. Introducing my new blog theme, Binafsha 2.0. Its a tweaked design from the Binafsha 1.0 which is my previous theme. I call it Binafsha 2.0 because it still has the same colour scheme, purple with various shades.

Before we go any further, let’s see how Binafsha 1.0 looks like. I uses WP Framework for this design.

For Binafsha 2.0, I uses Whiteboard framework with major arrangement. You can see they have same color scheme and overall layout.

This theme was inspired from many design blogs out there. I also had experimented few new features in this design.

What’s New?

• Typekit – You can see in the blog title. Its not a web standard font but it gives new feel about the blog.
• New fonts collection – Header uses Myriad Pro, the title uses Sovba and the content uses Lucida Sans Unicode
• 960 grid system – I want to make the blog shorter (less scrolling) and that’s where vertical sidebar took place
• Big fat footer – using the 960 grid system, I put many stuff down there to allow important ones on the sidebar
• Innity ads – replacing the old good Nuffnang
• Experiment with CSS3 – Put few text-shadow, rounded corners and box shadows.
• New comment section – everything is aligned!

Why I redesign?
There are few reason why redesigning the whole theme is crucial. The first reason is to improve the loading time. Previously, there are too many unnecessary items here and there. So I’ve decided to design it purposely for improving my loading time. These are the comparison of the loading time for both themes.

Second is to motivate my to write shorter post, as I don’t really read long post (more than 300 words). So I just reduced the font size and surprisingly, its easier to read with less scrolling!

I designed a homepage with thumbnails & excerpt is also to improve the loading time. Based on my statistics, for the past 3 months, most of the visitors came from search engine and they read my post page only, about 80%. While those who visited the homepage are 19%. Since its hard to know which entry do the read, I revert back to excerpt with thumbnails layout. Only 3% visit my About, Portfolio & Contact page.

I guess that’s it for today. I’ll post more creative ideas in the future. Been busy with few works recently.

P/S – Am I a speed addict? 😛