Stogie Review Gets A New Look

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As you may have noticed, Stogie Review has been given a new look. Over the past several months Jerry, Brian, and I have made passing mentions on how we needed to freshen things up and make the site cleaner and more organized.

Wanting to get away from the norm, we started looking at premium WordPress themes that would fit a cigar site such as ours. We found a variety of fantastic designs, but nothing that felt like it fit the content that we provide.

During a back and forth message session between Jerry and I, we wondered what would be involved in having a custom design done and how much it would cost. Thinking that the custom route was probably our best choice, I began researching designers.

The biggest problem I had was that it was difficult to choose a single designer. I saw some very interesting online portfolios created by some very creative individuals. To help remedy my problem, I contacted the only person that I knew had a custom design done recently, Darren Rowse of Problogger and Digital Photography School.

Darren recommended that I get in touch with a designer named Matt Brett and take a look at some of the work he has done. With an impressive portfolio and Darren’s recommendation, I contacted Matt to see what he could do for Stogie Review.

After a couple back and forth emails with Matt, Jerry and I made a decision to book the next available opening for a redesign. About two months later, we have what you see now.

Because Stogie Review puts a lot of focus on our video content, we absolutely needed a larger content area to place a video player. With the sidebars getting messier and messier as time went on, I really wanted to organize things better so that the site was easier to navigate.

A few releases back, WordPress rolled out a threaded comment feature. This feature allows people to comment on comments, so to speak, so that conversation flows a bit better. Our old theme did not support this and we wanted to take advantage of the capability with our new design. Gravatars have also been integrated into the comments to give individuals a bit more flare.

It was a pleasure to work with Matt to bring the design to life. We are very happy with the design and hope that you feel the same way. If you run into any bugs along the way, please shoot us an email via the contact form and we will do our best to address them.