Today’s theme is Darkwater.

It’s a bit dark, but I do like the bright blue, which highlights the text nicely.

Now to compare it with yesterday’s Vertigo:

Pros:

1) The default header (Once upon a mellow noon, website of David de Beer) I assigned to my website shows up as it should.

2) All the plugin cuties that struggled and clashed with Vertigo are showing up the way they ought to, for example, the Post Ratings (that’s where any passing bored person can rate a post. You click on the stars and viola! It was too cute to resist.)

3) I like how the tags (actually the categories I assign to each post) shows up clear and neat, as well as how all the important info is brightly displayed in blue.

4) There’s an rss subscribe button automatically added to the top right corner.

5) The footer is better, much better.

6) The best part and wholly unexpected. Here’s a sample post, the kind that you would get if you looked at the comments, or clicked on the title. Look top, what do you see? Yup, it tells you the name of the previous and next posts with a link you can click to go there. Now that, is very cool in my opinion. I can think of some blogs (Sherwood Smith, for example) where I love reading the comments as well as her posts, but it is a mild annoyance to always have to click in and out of the main blog to access different posts when I’m behind in my reading. Imagine she had this function — I could go to the comments, read them, and from there move from post to post with full access to her delicious commenters. Ease of use, perfect for lazy me.

Cons:

1) Remember that funky dropdown menu on the top? All gone now. Of course, it’s no problem. In wordpress, I can simply navigate my admin section to “Widgets” and add a Pages bar to the side. And here is where David learned a very valuable lesson about getting carried away by teh shiny — don’t get carried away by teh shiny. Because of the dropdown menus I thought now why should I go and add manual links to the main page? I don’t need no damn links, I gots me some dropdown!

(translated from the David):

Take Publications. I have 3 subpages there: Short Fiction. Free Fiction. Anthologybuilder.

With the dropdown menu, you hovered your mouse over Publications in the top navbar, and the 3 options showed up. Make your choice.

But, now I don’t have a dropdown anymore. As I said, no problem, just add the main Pages to the side. Click on About (where I got over-thrilled and wrote multiple ones.) See? You can’t access any of them, because I didn’t add the manual links to the main page, unlike Publications.

oh, the little things that can make you stumble!

2) The block quotes (my “reviews) with the Stumble posts are a bit harder to read.

3) Likewise, while I like the blue highlighting, the white text is only so-so for readability.

4) Beautiful coloring, but it is a very dark background overall.

 5) most unforgivable of all — no Home button, that will take you back to the front page when you navigate somewhere. How else am I supposed to find my way when I get lost on a blogsite?

The cons are fairly minor — you can creat horizontal navbars in wordpress (the documentation is somewhere in their Codex). I’m a little bit concerned about the coloring but overall I like this theme. Now go rate this post!

• ljxp_comments: 0
• ljxp_privacy: 0
• ljID: 610
• ratings_users: 0
• ratings_score: 0
• ratings_average: 0
• views: 1

Tags: blogging, Darkwater, fiction, linking, links, themes, website, wordpress