Whew. That was a lot of work. We had just migrated chowtimes to the the latest template. I hope you like the softer colors better. I personally like this better myself.

In the earlier template I had a choice of 10 (dark) colors to play with. I like changing colors because it gives a fresh new look without having to revamp the entire site.

But with this new upgrade template, I have an additional ten lighter choices. I think food sites look better in softer colors, don’t you think? The dark colors looked more … errr … “corporatey”.

What is really cool is that chowtimes now supports “threaded” (or “nested”) comments. You can now respond to individual comments if you want to. Your comments will be nested correctly so that you can follow the discussions better.

Some of the posts have lots of comments, like this one on Moist Chocolate Cake which has almost 100 comments. Such posts with that many comments makes the page outrageously long. This new template now supports “paged” comments.

I am still working out the kinks on this new template but let me know if you find anything wrong so that I can attend to it. For your info, this template works well with Firefox and Google Chrome but has some problems with the utterly hopeless IE.

For you WordPress bloggers out there who are looking for a site facelift, the following is a sales pitch …

You should seriously check out this theme I am using. It is called WP-Vybe and it is a premium theme … which means that it is not free to download. For us, the investment had been worth the while because it actually had help us bump up our click-through traffic by 20% on the very day we started using WP-Vybe.

I have not come across a more flexible and customizable WordPress theme than WP-Vybe. Here are some of the features:

• 2-column or 3-column layouts (chowtimes prefers 2-column). The columns can even be moved in whatever sequence you want too.
• Optional featured article glider for home page.
• Gravatar integrated into the theme
• Optional banner ad integration, but we did not want to do banner because it is too intrusive.
• Optional built-in post thumbnails
• Optional logo/header image integration via control panel
• Built-in site search, but we customized it to support Google Search for Adsense
• Built-in drop-down navigation for sub-categories and sub-pages
• Built-in author page and author profile with Gravatar support
• Widgetized sidebars
• Post author comments highlighted
• SEO techniques integrated (yahoo … no more fiddling around with SEO)

What is really, really awesome is the responsive support they provide. So, if you have any questions, just contact them via the forum and you get a response within a day. They even gave existing customers free upgrades too.

Ben