You have probably noticed that I am sporting a new theme on Projects Possible.  This theme – called Options – by Justin Tadlock is loaded with some great features and yet it is quite simple to setup, configure and run.  Some key things that I really like:

• The Search Bar located in the Navigation Bar
• The “exploding” navigation bar… when you hover over a page with sub pages they will appear below it.
• The size of the sidebar
• The tabbed sidebar section highlighting posts in various ways
• The clean display of the posts.
• Featured Articles (not in use yet but soon)
• Did I mention it is free?

If in your browsing through the blog you happen to notice a problem  in any area of the blog please let me know.  I will get it corrected as quickly as I can. 

Known issues as of today’s (8/5) email:  The Wine Cellar page is cutting off text on the right side.  The You Tube at the bottom of the sidebar does not consistently load.  Some video content will not play.

I’ve always liked the themes that blogohblog creates – see my other review here…  At one point just prior to settling in on my current theme I was going to use their Xplosivetheme and discussed a bit of a tweak with them which was later incorporated into the second release of Xplosive called Xplosive Reloaded.  Their themes as you can see from the links are quite clean, crisp, and really enhance rather than detract from the content.

Anyhow… I would love to be able to have a “custom” theme built for Projects Possible so I am entering the contest.  If you are a WordPress blogger I would recommend you take a look at the offer and get entered into the contest.

The 3 WordPress theme designers that I really like are:

Jai at Blog Oh Blog.  In particular there are a couple of themes there that I started using prior to Jai becoming owner of the site.  One of them is Big Blue and the other is Bob.   I liked Big Blue’s coloring, but I liked Bob’s use of excerpts on the main page.  I eventually mashed the two of them together and played around with a version of Big Blue that had the excerpt feature of Bob that I enjoyed.  I almost settled on using Xplosive but I wasn’t willing to give up the excerpt feature and as much as I tried my expertise did not allow me to get that functionality to work.

Small Potato at WPDesginer is another designer that I really like.   When I first started looking at WordPress it was Small Potato’s designs that I latched onto.  I ran his theme called Pride for a short while but I struggled getting my plugins to display properly in the sidebars.  I also played around with his Cold Blue theme for awhile when I first started.   What I really like about Small Potato and WPDesigner is that he shares his knowledge.   He has a tutorial section that has helped me tremendously in learning how all of this WordPress theme “stuff” works.  (Keep in mind to run WordPress you don’t need to do any “tweaking”… you can run literally thousands of different themes just as they are with no modifications at all.)

The final designer and the one that I settled on is Javier Garcia and the 1 Blog Theme with a “tweak”.  This is the theme that you are seeing on Projects Possible right now.   The tweak which will be coming soon is the excerpt capability that I like so well in Bob.   I chose this theme because it is so feature rich and configured from the WordPress Presentation dashboard.  It integrates some great features like the Socal Networking functionality, Related Posts, Email this Post and dual sidebars and an information rich footer.   I am going to create a brief tutorial on functionality that I will post in the future to help you get the most out of Projects Possible.

There were many other themes that I tried and many that I struggled to get working the way that I wanted them to work.  Now that I’ve chosen one, I can move on to getting it to display everything I want and to really focus in on the content.