But she’s so young.

Frequent visitors will notice that Contented Niche got a facelift today. I figured that if I was ever going to modify the theme for my blog, I’d better do it sooner rather than later. You run into all kinds of branding and confusion issues later if you change the theme once a blog is already truly popular–and I didn’t want to go through the headaches.

The previous theme was based on Charred by Jason of WPElements. It was a beautiful theme, truly. A bit dark at times, though, and I didn’t think it fit as well with the idea of my blog. Also, I was tired of battling it out with PNGs and IE 6. In any event–it wasn’t working out as smoothly as I hoped.

So now here we are. The new theme is a very heavily modified version of the Dreamworks Redux theme by Vinh of the Blog Design Blog. Thanks goes out to commenter Liam for introducing Vinh’s blog to me. I’d not heard of it before I checked out Liam’s site.

In any event, it was the colors and the typography that drew me to the Dreamworks Redux theme. Bold, beautiful, and a great starting point for what I hoped to achieve. I’m not a designer, after all, but I do know enough to be able to turn an existing theme into one that I find useful and attractive. While Dreamworks Redux is great in stock form, I think it truly shines now. But more on what exactly I did to edit the theme in another post.

There is, however, still more work to be done. I have yet to modify that big blank space in the header and I have some ads to put up here and there. Oh, and about that IE 6 support. Well, the site still looks like crap in Microsoft’s tired old browser–but at least it’s still functional.

So what do you think? Do you like the new theme or the old theme better?