Every once in a while, it’s time for a change. We’ve updated our site design for the first time since the blog was created in Oct 2010. There’s one big thing you need to know: If you subscribed to our old site, it’s important to know that your old subscriptions don’t carry over. So to get new notifications of comments and blog posts, you will have to resubscribe to our new site.
What do you think? Do you have any suggestions for us?
Wheat & Tares 
Small preferences:
1- Maybe there could be a couple more “recent comments” shown in the sidebar.
2- Maybe the banner picture could be a little bigger.
3- Maybe the homepage posts were a little smaller so that it could fit 3 posts per row.
I think the new design looks fine. Could you include the authors of each post on the home page? There are some authors that I make sure to always read, and I would like to be able to identify those from the home page. Thanks for everyone’s hard work on the blog!
Joel, I have been searching for a way to include post author attribution on the main page, but I can’t find this option. The downside of WordPress.com is that there are limitations on what customizations are available. I will keep searching though.
Jeff G,
I can increase the number of recent comments for sure when I get back to my desktop. I may have difficulties on your second and third points, though
Nice work! Looks awesome on my phone.
Jeff – I upped the Recent Comments to 10 instead of the default setting of 5.
I would love if the RSS feed would still be full and not truncated. (it was full before right?) I’ve found I’m much more likely to skip reading a post if it’s truncated in my feed reader. (Of course, after reading the full post, I’d click over to the site if I want to read or participate in the comments).
Is there any way to have the comments wider? I think 4-5 words-a-line-scroll-like-mad format is hard to read. Thanks, though, to everyone to does the hard work of maintaining this.
I also think that the bold, black-font title and date should go directly under the accompanying picture. And the last thing in each post’s “block” should be all the search terms or whatever they’re called. Right now my eye wanders and isn’t sure where the blocks begin and end.
Re. the above, the problem is especially apparent on the religious freedom one. The title of the post is much closer to the picture of the seer stone than to the Braveheart pic.
Jenn,
I went ahead and changed the feed to show the full post. I think this change should take place when the next post is scheduled.
Ruth,
I’m going to look into these changes, but I’m not sure we have the flexibility to change these
I’d prefer to have less space between lines of text, both in posts and in comments. It’s not dense enough and requires a lot of scrolling for a little reading.
From the peanut gallery: Why not a picture of an actual wheat field? Those bales aren’t of wheat.
Just a nit 😉
fbistif,
We were fiercely debating what the image should be, and then someone in the room said, “Oh, what the hay,” and thus, a new image was born.
(The header image is not set in stone, so it might change, haha).
KLC,
I have played around to reduce the spacing between lines in both the comments and the posts.
Ruth,
I think I figured out a way to make the site use more of the available space. This should also make the comments a little bit larger on bigger screens. Unfortunately, this will not help for mobile/smaller screens, so I’m going back to the drawing board to see what can be done there. Also, while I haven’t figured out a way to change the order of image vs categories vs title, I did find a way to make those three items stick closer together on the home page.
On the bale of hay this was purely aesthetic. The picture had more colors in it than any we could find of an actual wheat field. Since it is less prominent than our previous logo image, we’ll keep playing with it. We did go through about 20 options before settling on something vaguely pastoral rather than literally wheat or tares.
There are days that I feel like I was run through a thresher, rolled up, and tossed into a shape that wasn’t very natural.
Kinda like being baled.
Lots of symbolism in that bale of hay ..
AmateurParent,
That’s rough, but also extremely profound.
P.S. My suggestions above applied to how it looks on my phone. That’s how I read 90% of the time. But on a laptop, things look good and are readable. Thanks.
Ruth,
I just figured out how to do different settings for mobile vs desktop, so I’m going to play around with how large the text presents on phone.