Thank you to the folks who provided feedback regarding what you wanted to see in the site redesign. I dove in really thinking that I wanted to get back to the simple look of a two-column layout but ended up settling on the Thesis Theme from Pearsonified. I think that it gives the initial simple appearance i was going for while also providing some flexibility to layout widgets in two columns. Based on feedback, I also wanted to get away from the black background and use highly readable fonts. I think that the theme gives a great starting point on that front.

Please give the new comments fields a workout and let me know any feedback or suggestions that you might have. I’d love to hear it!

I removed a bunch of crufty content and uploaded some starter images for the blog. The images are bit “wintery” but they can be updated fairly simply now that things are up and running. If you have any great photos you think would go well, feel free to send them to me. I’d like to build up a deck of maybe 20 or 30 to cycle through randomly and keep things fresh.

Thanks to Ross for coming over and drinking wine while helping me explore and play with these new templates! Now if we can just figure out how to get the Faves widget to fit in with things and play nice (we spent an hour last night trying to figure out why the “unstyled” widget was overwriting our CSS attributes), we’ll be golden.

Hi there all! I’ve been taking a look at doing some things to make The Puget News better. While I have a few ideas (and more frequent content is still the TOP priority!), I’d really like to hear from any of you that are passionate about design to give me ideas on changes you’d like to see here. I’ve got my friend Ross coming over to help me with some template design stuff tomorrow so I’d like to get a sense if we’re working on the right things.

So please, if you have an idea on how you’d like to see this blog’s design change so that it would be more useful to you, let me know via the comments below. Do you hate my color scheme? Want larger print?

The design ideas I’m looking at:

1. Switching from a 3-column to a 2-column layout, giving more room to the posts and possibly expanding the size of the remaining sidebar as well
2. Adding tag-based post-navigation via WordPress widget

The content ideas I’m exploring are as follows:

1. Getting a larger group of writers to post content for the site. If you’ve got ideas for interesting original content on art, architecture, design, literature, politics, whatever, I’d like to have you writing here. Please feel free to contact me via email at eric [at] thepugetnews [dot] com!
2. Continuing to expand the focus of this site well beyond the current focus on the literary.
3. Getting to at least one original content post per day, preferably two…

That’s all I’ve got so far but I’m open to all suggestions on making this a more useful and fun place to discuss and debate ideas.

Hello lovely people! I just upgraded my wordpress install. In the past I have managed to hork my entire blog doing this. This time, it appears the upgrade has come off without a hitch – which has me worried. If you see any wonk, please let me know and I will endeavor to figure it out or at least make pleas to some helpful software deities.