Well this is exciting. WPShout 3.0, the third incarnation of the WPShout design has arrived.

Inspiration from…

This new design is more suited to the “art direction” posts that have been popping up recently and they’re certainly something that I want to start doing more of – this post has a Perishable inspired background, something that took me maybe ten seconds to do. It’s good.

Big thanks to Ben Gillbanks for showing me that blogs don’t have to have the same boring look to them, but in fact can look a slight bit better. With a bit of time and effort, I’ve now got something that allows me to, at the press of a button, split posts into columns, change the font or get rid of the bulk of the sidebar. I’m really pleased with the result.

I wanted something that was easy to read and looked stunning and allowed me to add a unique look to posts. I’ve already had a lot of fun playing around with the layout of Thursday’s post. You’ll see why then.

Dear IE. Sod Off.

The site looks acceptable in Internet Explorer, but it’s missing a lot of the CSS3 that I’m using extensively – things like text-shadow just about everywhere (although @font-face is working!), the animation on the links (I could spend all day hovering and un-hovering 🙂 quite probably don’t work. I don’t really care though. Only a very small proportion of visitors come from IE and so it’s not a major problem.

Going Premium

I’ve been wanting to announce this for a while, and today I can finally do that. I’m launching my very own premium themes site, along with the very talented Alex Cragg, we’re hopefully looking at a January 2010 launch and this theme you’re looking at now will be one of the first we release. The other one in the works at the moment is quite probably the most advanced magazine style theme ever with some really advanced features that we’re holding up our sleeve until a bit closer :).

This new themes site will be called WPShift and you’re very welcome to hop over there and sign up for our newsletter and we’ll let you know when we launch.

Big thanks to Alex for helping me out with some stuff on this design – that nice big slider at the top – that’s his doing, as are the wonderful comments.

Archiving the lot

As you might have noticed, each post has a big pic on it and whilst I spent two hours last weekend updating a handful of posts, most are now sporting the WordPress logo. Sorry. It takes ages and I really couldn’t be bothered.

Performance

Something else I’ve tried to do is make the site load quicker, but on a site with so many images, it’s fairly hard to do. I’ve done my best though and it does load relatively quickly. Most of the time.

So then. What’s up next?

Some really exciting stuff. That’s all I’m going to say for the moment. Join us again on Thursday for the first of four really good posts, possibly the best yet. Until then, please do let me what you think of the new design by leaving a comment with said thoughts.