The site has gone through a pretty serious overhaul in the past 24 hours;  I had been toying with the idea of messing around with the CSS from the old site, largely because I was finding it hard to read the tiny, supercompressed font — and I was generally unhappy with the way it was handling pictures.  Spacing was another issue:  with this new spacious theme, I wonder if KirkBhoy’s much anticipated MMPs will become even more Simmons-esque.

The current site was designed by Jinsona, who offers a number of AJAX and PHP based WordPress themes for those of us who don’t have the time or the inclination to mess around with the special brand of nutsiness to be found in WordPress’s PHP files, plugins, and widgets.

I will be changing the color scheme and some of the graphics later this week;  I’m going to create a new banner for the top of the page, and try to morph most of this blue to red.  Can’t have it look too much like the Everton site.

Couple of things to remember:

• If you want to put something in the top “Featured” block, categorize it as “Featured”.  The latest article will go up here.
• If you want to get something on the slider below, categorize it as “News”.  The top 4 or 5 news articles will go there.
• Each article should be associated with a 200 x 120 px JPG thumbnail.  Most of our previous articles haven’t been, so that’s why you may see white boxes in associated with the features and stories below.  I’ve put together a stock thumbnail which will be in the media gallery to save you any time with The Photoshop.
• To associate your thumbnail with the article, you’ll have to add a custom field (homethumb) and give it the name of the thumbnail you’ve included in the article.  This sounds a lot trickier than it actually is.
• If you don’t want to create a thumbnail, just add a custom field called homethumb (from the drop-down menu) and enter the word stock for the value.  It’ll work.  Trust me.
• Excerpts are now enabled:  you can dump in a short teaser for your story — or the first paragraph, and it’ll show up as a tease in the feature boxes.
• If you can access the Dashboard, you can change the posted video up there on the top right-hand side of the page.    Just go into Appearance >> Themes >> Zinmag Redux Options, and you’ll see the place to dump in the embedding code you get from YouTube or Vimeo or what not.  Be careful:  it has to be a fixed size — you’ll see the specs where you have to drop in the embedding code.

Whew.  Blogging is hard work!