I’ve known for a while that I have wanted to change the way that JohnHawkinsUnrated.com has looked. A big part of the issue was trying to figure out what the heck I wanted to do with the site. I poured over hundreds of templates trying to figure out what I was aiming for. Almost every theme that I liked was more of a magazine/newspaper style with lots of different areas that all required some form of separate content. The more I thought about it, the less I felt that this was the way I wanted to go with my blog. Hell, that’s pretty much what stopped me from blogging on geeeek.com was a lack of direction but still having the desire to write.
At the end of the day, the biggest question I had to ask myself was: do I want to try and turn my blog in to a way to make money? The more I thought about it, the more I came back with a resounding NO. JHU was started as a way for me to just write what I want to write about. Be it personal experience, product review, movie review or just a place to rant about whatever is bothering me. And, after a year of doing just that, I’ve come to the conclusion that THIS is exactly how it will stay.
So, about the face lift. After searching through all the templates, I realized exactly what I wanted to get from my theme. 2 column, clean design with a large content area to display photos in posts. I first found this theme a week or so back when I had the same list of needs for a different site, PhotoSafariNoobs.com. The more I looked at the template, the more I realized this is exactly what I’m looking for on JHU. I’m sure I’ve got a little bit of clean-up left to do, but I’m not worried about it too much.
And now that the design is out of the way, I can get back to working on content.
Stay tuned.
