I have been working up revamping on of my tutorial sites lately. I wanted to create a new layout that was somewhat minimalistic and also wanted to brush up my WordPress skills. I mocked up the layout in Photoshop and coded the design using XHTML/CSS. The main goal was to increase readability. One focus of the design was ad placement. I wanted to include more ad spots for purchase monthly and also make the ads less intrusive. The solutions was to remove some of the more intrusive in post ads and replace them with 125×125 side bar ads.
I also wanted to add some additional functionality to the site. Being a tech related site I saw that we were getting a pretty significant number of off topic comments on posts. We decided to launch a forum to accommodate these requests. Now users can ask anything they feel with out interrupting the discussion at post level.
The comment section was updated to include avatar images and also nested comments. The main category pages also feature a thumbnail for each post. On each post page there is a box at the top giving the description/categories/tags/etc. I also wanted to focus promoting social network/bookmarking services. That was accomplished using the sociable plugin.
Overall I am happy with the changes and think that we will see a great response from our user base. TeamTutorials is on of the long term projects I am focusing on. There is one feature that I wanted to implement that is not yet ready for production and that was a post rating system. I hope to have that feature release in a few weeks.
comments