Re-Designed: PhotoMag

This is one beauty of a photography blog theme, perfect for all types of portfolios. There is one problem with it however that I do have to alert prospective users to: You have to sometimes reload it in order to get the top header bar to work properly. There are situations where all you get is a very narrow bar at the top into which the logo barely fits and there is no menu at all. My guess is that this has to do with the huge slideshow at the top, that it is eating up too much horsepower. But then, I have a pretty powerful machine and if it is acting up here, then I have no idea how it would behave with lesser configurations.

I did the usual typographic tweaks, but no really big changes as you can see - only made things a bit lighter and smaller. One other change that I made relates to the background: Black seemed way too overpowering to me, so I changed that to a dark grey. And I also made the rollover on the post thumbnails completely opaque in that same gray in order to increase the overall minimal feel of the theme.

I can see from the embedded "about us" blurb (which the end user would need to change to their own information obviously) that this theme originates from Blossom Themes who are really some of the best theme creators that I am encountering in my travels. Highly recommended, despite the small reload glitch. Although I have not tried it, I am quite sure that this theme would look good without the top slideshow also, which one can achieve very easily by just removing the slider gadget from the layout. And that may also resolve the loading issue. Below I am showing my tweak with a small scrollthrough video, but since the original is structured exactly like my tweak you will see only a screenshot of that.

You can download my tweak of photomag here > > >. And the URL of the original is in this list 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.