Thanks, bestofblogger. The original theme is by N Design Studio. http://www.ndesign-studio.com/. The original was fixed width and I changed it to be variable width. I also changed it to display excerpts rather than full posts and inserted the comments inline. I added a number of small touches to it and a bunch of plugins.

I’m glad it worked well in Mozilla. My laptop is 1024×768 and the small font looks OK, but I was worried it would be too small in higher-resolution monitors. I might actually change the scale to em’s instead of pixels as that should render even more consistently across various monitor resolutions. What’s a pain is that all the other fonts are defined as relative to the base font, so if I increase the base font size then I’ll have to adjust all the other font sizes as they will be too large. Thanks for confirming that this was an issue and worth the time to change it all.

Thanks for the feedback, vaibhavkanwal. I did start with a pretty popular theme and while I made a TON of changes to it, the overall look is pretty much the same as the original. I spent most of my time getting it variable width, tweaking the home page with custom top and bottom widgets, 404 page, search pages, tweaking plugins, enhancing the Facebook connect functionality, etc.

I did change out the header graphic, but its very similar to the original (blue, abstract). I would like to get a header that plays up the social aspects of the site, I’m just more of a programmer at heart than an artist. Which leads me to ask in general if folks have found some good sites that have headers that you can use for free where I might find something suitable to start from.

As for typography, I did increase the base font size earlier today per bestofblogger’s suggestion. So you probably were looking at the new version.

As for being run-of-the-mill in general, was it mostly the header that you thought should be souped up or did the layout and combination of plugins, etc. not seem right to you? I wasn’t really trying to showcase a new killer theme as I’ve used a stock one, but was wanting to know if the overall site layout, content, plugins, etc. all seemed to work well together and accomplish what I was trying to accomplish with the site (focus on my Facebook apps, but mention my other websites, provide curated social networking news that users of my Facebook apps might be interested in).

One thing I’ve been toying with is the home page design. I’ve played with featured article sliders, grouping articles by category, including thumbnails, etc. I have been able to make all that work, but in the end feel like having an excerpt and the related comments shown inline was most suitable for a new site still trying to get the word out about what the site is for and what I do. If you have some home page layout or even full website you think I should look at trying to mirror on my site, let me know.

Thanks again!

vaibhavkanwal, I do like your author bio on the articles. I have an about us in the footer throughout the site and have gone back and forth on showing my ugly mug versus a site logo.

The funny thing is that your header that says ProgrammingKid in blue and green is almost identical to the colors I used in my initial logo. I only show a small logo in the footer, though. I should try to work the logo into the header.

Also, I found a really nice website with a ton of great-looking website header images. http://www.freewebpageheaders.com/. None of them have a “social” theme for my website, but there are some great graphics there.