Since the launch of Colours Magazine (alomst 18 monthis ago) I have not had a redesign of the original website. Where the original wordpress theme served it’s purpose it was hard to manage. By the time I launched Colours Magazine I had already heavily modified the wordpress theme and within a couple of months due to on going needs of the publication the site wentthrough several more changes. Where it continued to serve it’s purpose at that time, since the middle of last year it was becoming increasingly obvious that the backend design had to change along with the layout of the articles.
That being said, with nothing on the wordpress theme horizon that could serve my purpose out of the box or with minimal changes and not having enough cash to get a designer to do a custom design I decided to go with the Thesis framework and do a complete redesign myself from scratch. Where I have spent quite some time with software development in another life, I am not essentially a webdesigner, so Christmas time meant spending a few late nights re-learning some aspects of CSS and working on the new design. Those of you who are reading this on their RSS readers they would want to click through now so they can see the new design.
Where the new design is no where finished so be prepared to see me tinkring with the design elements in future, it is however in a state where I could show it to general public. The new design is all about showing increased readibility, wider layout for larger pictures where the old layout could only support pictures 520px wide this new layout can do 630px wide photographs easily. It was also about displaying all the content on the main page so it was easily available and browseable which in the old design it was not. Another important change with the new setup is that it is relatively very easy to post articles, especially since I am getting some regular contributors who would be looking to post articles by themselves. The old theme required a lot of custom setups to get the article to the main page, now it is relatively very easy and straightforward. So anyone looking to join our team would find it easy to get the articles out. This would ofcourse mean that I would be able to focus on growing the publication and bringing new stuff to it.
So ladies and gents, have a browse around, let me know what works for you and what doesn’t, I look forward to hearing your suggestions.
If you would like to join the Colours Magazine team and publish on the magazine. Please get in touch via editor[at]coloursmag. I look forward to hearing from you.
