A Minimalist Theme Indeed

I am getting lazy as a web designer. No, I am not a designer on par with people who incorporate Flash, run ASP, use Dreamweaver or add in a bunch of other features to help make their site stand out. Instead, I prefer to keep things simple to concentrate on adding relevant content to my site. Hence, my decision to swap out a two year old stock Flash theme with a simple open source one column design developed by Contented Designs.

When I founded this site two years ago, I purchased a theme from one of those template retailers thinking I’d keep it a short while before making an update. As it turned out, other projects pressed in putting a theme change on the back burner. With my personal website portfolio being emptied out over the past few weeks, I decided to spend a few days making the change.

One thing I did not change were the inner pages. Numbering some 340 files, I decided to use the new theme for the main tabbed pages while keeping an older template in place for the internal pages. This mish mosh look is likely to be frowned upon by web pros, but I am not concerned about that — the site is easy to navigate, much more so than before.

Relish All Comments!

I’ve been asked by a few of the visitors to The Article Writer blog as to which WordPress plug-in I am using to thank people who leave comments here. Comment Relish was developed by Justin Shattuck, a plug-in designed to send an email message to all first time commentators when enabled.

Easily customizable, Comment Relish can be set up within minutes. Just make sure that you set the Enable Comment Relish command to True in order to have it send messages out. I noticed after I made a recent WP update, that Comment Relish stayed turned off when I deactivated and then reactivated plug-ins as recommended by WordPress when doing any update.

Customizable WordPress Plug-In Tags

There are several tags you can add to Comment Relish to offer further customization including URL to your site, date stamp, site’s RSS feed, and more. Sure, this plug-in may not be necessary but it is one that I hope helps to distinguish The Article Writer in the vast sea of blogs.