New layout for my blog: Finalized!

Slept at 2am last night, since I’m so excited with tweaking the latest look of my blog together with transferring all the gadgets/widgets that I have previously. You may have read in my previous entry about the 2 weeks time spent for the search of the new template. Well, being in Market Research line for 7 years already, it will seem odd if I didn’t do any research first before selecting one.

First, let see Browser contribution of the total visit to my blog for this month (starting 1st Nov until yesterday). Suprisingly, Firefox users exceed IE users. But even so, I can’t neglect my IE visitors, where the new template that I like suffered CSS glitch in IE 6.0. Works fine in IE 7.0.

Now, lets look at how many percentage of IE users is on version 6.0. It seems that 40% of IE users still on version 6.0, and I have to do something on the script – well as stated previously, my whole weekend is working on that. I’m so glad that it is fixed.

So, what I really like about this template anyway? First, the very important thing is its clean design and plenty of white space. Just my taste.

Second, this template is Web 2.0 template already, making use of Blogger’s new layout page elements. As you can see, every section can be treated as module / gadget / widget – whatever you call it. And rearranging the order is still drag and drop. Also, there are hundreds (or maybe thousands) freely available widgets out there to be used. Adding it is just as simple as clicking your mouse, and drag drop to arrange it.

But, this feature has been around for so long already, and there are so many templates out there that support this feature! Well, it is just that it’s hard to find the one that I like, and converting my old template to something like this is just something that I don’t skill (and time).

This, this very neat and strategic placement Adsense Link Unit and Ad Unit. This is a good money maker you know if you know how to harvest from it (which I’m still weak at that). I also like the search box, which is link to my AdSense for Search. Another money making opportunity 😉

Forth, this is a 3-column template – which seems to be trend now for blog. I do think 3-column template is quite cool. Having 2 columns for sidebar, widgets can be distributed between the two. Less clutters, and visitor can access the most commonly use widget easier without having to scroll too much.

But the downside of that is, it required longer width to accomodate the extra side bar. If my previous template is browser friendly to those using 800×600 screen resolution, but this one requires at least 1024×768 screen resolution. So. Let’s look at the screen resolutions distribution for this month again, shall we?

Well. It seems not very much people on 800×600 screen resolution now. It seems to quite OK to ignore that niche. I guess they have to live with horizontal scrollbar when visiting my blog.

One thing left to experiment – seasonal flash header. It’s kinda my signature already 😉 Got to think of a way to fit that into this template.

Finally, here is how my previous template looks like, of which I have been using it for about 3 years, 2 months and 14 days. Saved into Flickr down the memory lane. Click for bigger version (by choosing All Size). But be warned that it’s a 5MB image to be loaded.