Regular readers & visitors to WindowsTalk may have received a surprise on a recent visit here: over the weekend I rolled out a new theme for WindowsTalk.org and it looks very different from any of the past incarnations of WT.
Not that I was particularly looking for a new theme; rather I came across this theme (Arras Theme) when visiting one of my favourite sites “Bleed Green” a site regarding the Philadelphia Eagles of the NFL. They had recently upgraded their theme, so I scrolled down to the bottom of the home page there to see what theme they were using on their WordPress site. It was “Arras Theme“, so clicked on the link and was pleasantly surprised to see that this was a FREE WordPress theme!

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Wow. A theme this nice usually costs some money whether it is $20 or up to $100 or so. After all, this is no plain vanilla WP theme; this is a ‘magazine’ style theme with a very nice control panel for customization. Not a lot of coding knowledge is needed to get a great-looking blog up and running with this theme!

Here’s the Arras theme’s control panel in the WP Dashboard (click to see a larger image):

Too good to be true? Being naturally cautious, I downloaded the theme and tried it out on my test blog. So far so good; some other themes I have tried required endless customizations and fiddling with code before it approaches anything near presentable.

All of my current plugins worked fine, or just needed a tweak here & there to adapt to the new theme. There is free support for this theme at the designer’s forum as well and I found them very helpful.

Satisfied with the results of this theme on my test blog, I decided to apply it to WindowsTalk.org. A weekend is a good time to roll out a new theme, at least in my case, for site visits here tend to be more numerous during the week. Your mileage may vary!

All went smoothly, and once I had the thumbnail images in place (most are royalty-free images from stock.xchng) everything started to look really great.

Other than the theme, everything else is the same here; and all the content can be searched from the WindowsTalk Search Page. As always, feel free to subscribe to our newsletter to keep up to date on new posts here and you can follow WindowsTalk on Twitter too, just use the icons on the top right of any page to connect to us here.

Let us know what you think of the new look!