Balkhis in Blue-Navy Theme
Well, As I have mentioned in my few posts before that Balkhis Crew was working on a redesign for this site. We have finished the work. This theme comes with alot of new editions. My goal is to constantly update the site and get rid of all the technical issues that my past theme had.
I am sure you guys are probably wondering why the change in design?
Problems with the Old Design
- Not Compatible with All Browsers – Firefox 3 had some minor issues with the design. IE 6.0 was a mess.
- Slow – Past design was using alot of images therefore the load time was high, so some of my audience were unhappy about that.
- Issues with Padding – As I was using word limit plugin to display the excerpts from each category on homepage, sometimes due to the use of images, the padding wouldn’t work out right.
- Multiple other minor problems.
I would like to thank all of my regular users who has supported me with their honest feedback and reviews. There were some other sites that pointed out my mistakes as well. Thanks alot to Nabil for bringing the load time of all sites together, so I could see where I stood among the rest.
I am open to all feedback. Even though we have tested the design extensively, certain things can only be tested with a live display. So I would like to apologize in advance for any inconvenience during our upgrade and fixes. Please use the contact form to report any problem.
Usually, I like to code my personal projects in private place, but this time was a bit different. I went through this design step by step, teaching some of my friends who wished to learn html and wordpress. It was a pleasant experience, I think it would be fun if I get to do that with a group of around 15 – 20 people. We got alot of feedback while we did that. Every minor bug was detected because there were many different eyes, but I think there is always something that is left out and thats why I depend on you guys.
So help me get this site to the next level. Did I mention with the rate Balkhis is going, I should get around 35,000 uniques this month 
Hey, I am Syed Balkhi, The guy who is behind Balkhis Inc. I entered the industry back in 2002 not knowing a single thing. I barely spoke English at that time. In the past six years, my language barrier has been eliminated. Aside from English, now I also speak html, and php. Along with the languages I have also managed to master a few arts. Art of web-designing started when I first entered. Messing around with photoshop, I learned how to create my first web design. Now I founded a web designing firm Uzzz Productions. After running numerous amount of websites in various niche, I have mastered the art of web-development. Now I am compiling a resource of what I already know, and what I am learning on this blog. This resource is to help me if I ever need a guide to look back to, and it is help my fellow webmasters.
Everything looks perfect in this theme
Good work.
Thanks for your feedback Chetan
A clean, fast, sturdy, serious, theme.
It suits your blog perfectly.
It would be better if you could add a bit more space between the lines.
thanks for the advice, that is taken care of
That’s done.
Now, PERFECT
New design looks good, I love the blue colors you have used.
I like it. It is cleaner and a little less busy.
I feel like I’m floating. Maybe widen the content area by like 5px? It feels a little too tiny…
Overall, very nice theme, though. Good work!
Even I agree. The sidebar is a bit too wide and the content area is a bit small. Personally, I like the content area to be somewhere around 600px (though most blogs have it nowhere close to 600)
[...] is already gone. I was particularly very busy. As you can see, Balkhis already have a new design (Reasons why I changed the old design). Today is the first day for school. Atleast for University of Florida Students. My classes [...]
I love the darker colour scheme – and it definently loads faster
I do agree with Corey though – the content area would look better a little bit wider
Good job
If you ask me, I loved the prev theme more. And the theme before that was even better (though it looked like a shoemoney ripoff). This theme somehow feels incomplete. I loaded this theme and felt like a bg image was missing. Due to this, the sidebar looks a bit funny.
Well, the first theme if you didn’t notice was in tables because I was trying some new things. Then it looked too much like Shoemoney.. It was an inspiration from shoemoney. The second theme, like I said was very colorful and I liked it too. But cross browser compatibility was one of the main issues with that one. Also it loaded very slow.
The reason why content have space between Sidebar is because I want the users to distinguish between the two. I want the design to look clean.
No background image is not missing. Sidebar was initially designed like that. But then you can’t really satisfy everyone.
A few minor suggestions:
1. Whenever you write a comment the background has several of your logos tiled. You may want to reduce that to a larger version of your logo that has a Blending Option done on it and opaqueness reduced to about 40%. That way the logo is still visible and won’t blend in with some of the text making it hard to read.
2. I think you should move the blog button towards the beginning preferably next to About so that its more visible.
Other than that, I really like the new design. The search bar is easily accessible. The nav bar looks great. The sidebar is more organized. Great upgrade in my opinion.
Thanks for your feedback Nabil. I will work on the opacity of the comment highlight button.
Blog button should stay there in my opinion
Excellent work there bro!
Its always fun when we can design and code websites on our own, we can keep experimenting.
I pretty like this theme as always, and your alexa started dancing damn good!
Best wishes
yeah traffic this month has increased by alot…
I like the new look. Very simple, clean and crisp. I like order and this blog is very orderly. I think you will only see good come from this redesign. Eric
Syed your design is top notch. This is possibly the best one I have seen you do.
I always thought the old design was slow to load which is why I often only read your posts in the email newsletters.
It looks so simple and clean now. The round edges give it a sleek feel.
Nice work, i’m impressed!
Mike
Great theme
Donate me the old theme
hehe … good one
Love The New Theme Just Kinda Boring But As A webmaster. I understand about load times very easy to nav!
Congratulations
Refreshing our blogs is always a nice thing to do! I like it!
P.S.: your blog is valid xHTML
hehe I already know, but just incase if it goes invalid because I know the pages that have youtube videos on them are invalid. And I don’t want to claim that the site is valid but on most pages it is.