Search Engine Panel’s New Theme
Posted: March 29th, 2008
As alluded to in Sunday’s “Hectic Easter Weekend” post, I’ve been on the lookout for a fresh new template for SEP. This new theme, Bozzeny’s SIMSEK3C, was released just a couple of weeks ago and I’ve been busy customizing it for the past few days.
The main objective I sought to achieve revolved around more user-friendly sidebars. By editing the CSS file, some PHP modification (more on this below) and a 3-column design base, SEP now has flanking sidebars with nice section headings that really stand out.
Many changes were made to the original SIMSEC3C, but most notable are the fonts and colour. I’ve changed the fonts from the theme’s default “Trebuchet MS” to more readable Arials and Verdanas throughout the blog. The text in the top bar that lists SEP pages (Home, About, Lexi… – whoops, almost gave away our secret project) is now legible, instead of the tiny text in SIMSEC3C. Blues and a little bit of green was added to liven the theme up.
Obstacles of Note
In the process of revising someone else’s work, I’ve ran into a few obstacles. The first obstacle occurred while I was modifying the site’s footer. Bozzeny had made it difficult to do so with , but I found a way around it. 
Another strange thing I ran into was the naming structure of the sidebars. For some reason, the theme’s creator decided to name the left sidebar as sidebar2 and the right sidebar as sidebar1. So, I went ahead and fixed that so the blog’s backend isn’t such a mess.
I’m happy with our new look for the most part, although I may make slight adjustments here and there as needed.
Questions and/or comments are welcomed!