Switching to a minimalistic theme – 281

Personal Blogs, Wordpress

I switched from K2 theme to Freshy some time back and though the theme looked nice, there were quite a few problems with the Freshy Theme.

  1. Too many images in the theme (including bullets etc) made the page load very slow. A part of it is also because of the hosting speed (GoDaddy)
  2. The theme was breaking up in IE6. Though IE7 seems to have fixed a lot of CSS issues, my analytics suggest that still many people are using IE6

Paul and Niel Patel of Pronet Advertising had come up a theme called 281 some time back and I was very impressed by that theme.

As Paul puts it, the intent was to have a strong WordPress theme that combined slick minimalist aesthetics, speed and search engine optimization.

I have to agree that it does look slick, does load faster and regarding SEO I have to wait a bit longer to see if there any improvements.

I would love to hear your comments too ! Does it look good ? Are the pages loading faster ? Also don’t forget to check out the new Archives template 🙂

You can download the 281 theme here. Also Eli Foner has adapted 281 with 3 columns.

Comments on this entry are closed.

  • Vasuki Jan 13, 2007 Link

    Pages are seeming to load quite faster…I like this look-n-feel, pretty simple and elegant.

  • venukb Jan 13, 2007 Link

    Thanks for the feedback, I guess when you tested, the java scripts were still not in place, I have added now, hope there is no much difference in the load speeds 🙂