Re-Designed: Kaplan

Now, this is one gorgeous magazine theme. So nice, in fact, that it made me overlook something which I really did not like that the original creators (Blossom Themes) had done here, which is that they inserted very big advertisements both on the home page and the top and the bottom of the post page. And, you cannot delete these, as soon as you do the whole thing falls apart, the theme no longer works. I really wondered whether to tweak this beauty for that reason. But, in the end, I concealed all of the ads with transparent images and got it to work in that way. There is an HTML widget on the layout page on the lower sidebar - this you cannot delete, so if you want to use this be aware that you need to be very careful while you are deleting stuff from the layout tab.

I am a very big stickler for keeping all of the footer credits of the original creator, indeed I have a whole blurb about the necessity of doing this on the footer of this site. That credit has to be there, these people are the actual creators of these things. But, I do think that there is a huge difference between a footer credit and huge ads that totally ruin the work of the end user. So, like I said, I do not like what was done here. And I was especially taken aback by Blossom Themes having done this since I have such a high opinion of their work.

The changes I made are the routine ones: Eliminating color, changing titles from lowercase to uppercase (I did not change the fonts except for replacing body text fonts with Roboto), changing font weights and sizes. Again, I deleted some of the gray image overlays, in other cases I made the gradient overlays that they used lighter and tighter. I made the whole layout wider. And then, finally, I fixed a detail which I thought was bit too fiddly - the slanted double lines in front of all the gadget headings - which I turned into straight verticals.

You can download my tweak of "Kaplan" here > > >

And the URL for the original template is here > > >

Important! 3rd party responsive Blogger themes have a lot of quirks that you will have to fix which come about every time that you restore a theme. So, this is not something that I can resolve with my tweak, there are some things that you, the end user, has to take care of before the theme is fully operational. To find out what these are and how to fix them, please make sure you look at the Instructions Page > > > right after you install the theme.