New Blog Design

Every 6 months or so, I like to get a new blog theme for my blogs. I was way overdue with this one as I hadn’t updated it since May 2008. As usual when looking for an original WordPress theme, I went directly to Smashing Magazine as they always have the best looking designs for whatever you might be looking for. After digging around the website, I finally found what I was looking for: the ColorPaper theme designed by FTL.

Setting up the theme was not as easy as I thought. At first glance, everything was looking great but then I realized that there was a conflict with my All In One SEO plugin: all pages were showing the same meta title: Sebastien Page, which is the blog name. Other meta information (keywords and description) were working fine though. I looked around on the web for hours in search of a possible solution to my problem without finding anything.

So in order to keep my blog as SEO optimized as possible, I had to tweak the <meta> </meta> tags in the header.php file. My meta title nows looks like this:

<title><php if(is_home()): ?>Sebastien Page<php endif; ?> <php if ( is_single() ); ?><php trim(wp_title(“”)); ?></title>

This function basically tells the browser to use “Sebastien Page” as meta title if it is the home page, or else, it will use the post title, tag, category, or archive as the meta title.

I emailed the folks over at FTL to see if they know what my problem with All In One SEO may be and I hope they will get back to me, although I doubt it.

I also had issues with the javascript tags in the sidebar and I had to disable them.

I have to admit that ColorPaper is a great theme but the documentation that came with it was inexistent.

Leave a comment to tell me what you think of this new theme :)