Hello TMV readers and welcome to the new look. As you can see, it looks totally different from the previous site. First and foremost, I need to give credit to Nick at Elegant Themes for the awesome design. This is one of his stock designs (customized by yours truly). Without him, this redesign wouldn’t have happened. Here are the changes and explanation:
1. Removal of the large “The Moderate Voice” graphic and replaced with stylized text.
2. All posts are now in excerpt format. You get an excerpt of the posts and if you want to read more, click on the post title. The reason we did this is so the site would load faster, better organization, cleaner look, and emphasis on the article with the distraction of other articles (when you click the post title). The homepage should speed up since it’s not looking for Disqus comments until you click the individual post. This also keeps YouTube and other videos on the single post display, this speeding up the site.
3. Bigger sidebars. We will be adding some exciting content to the sidebars. Stay tuned.
4. Archive navigation. The site shows the most recent 30 posts on the front page. To read further back, utilize the “Archive” drop down list at the bottom of the site. Click on the month and you can go further back (with pages). This allows for a cleaner look with better functionality.
5. Image captions. Once all TMV authors and editors get familiar with the function, you can see small images on the homepage which gives you the full, properly justified/places image in the post when you click on the post title. This gives all TMV posts a more consistent and professional look.
6. Random blogroll. Since TMV’s blogroll was so long and cluttered the old site, we now have a random blogroll. Various blogs/sites will be shown with each page refresh. DO NOT WORRY (for those on the blogroll). Your site will be shown. We are testing this to see how it plays out.
7. Featured article. This is another test. For now, you will just see this article in all its glory on the top of the site. As we work through the functionality, we’ll be able to feature popular posts.
8. You will see the word “No categories” right below the TMV byline. That will disappear as we organize our categories.
We understand this is a big change but we are confident that this will work out for the better. In the coming days and weeks, we will be adding more content and working through any site issues that may arise. Thank you very much for your continued support and readership!
— The Moderate Voice Editorial Staff
UPDATE 05/29/09 @ 12:06AM EST: We will be sorting through the color contrast issue (minor) and getting our feed links back up later today.
UPDATE 05/29/09 @ 02:31PM EST: We are making several enhancements to the current design. They are longer post excerpts, more visible hyperlinks, navigation enhancements, and blogroll enhancements. Keep referring to this post for the latest information.
I’m not complex. Don’t have time for all that. And all that complex stuff bad for the stomach. Just color me simple and plain with a twist.