The New Design

A couple of weeks ago, the 10,000th visitor found their way here to The Experiment. I’ve been considering how to mark this momentous occasion (even though those visits aren’t particularly reliable and certainly, my sitting at home hitting F5 trying to drive up my visit count doesn’t help. Not that I would ever do that). I decided to celebrate in what can only be described as an odd way. I’ve changed the theme of the site to the current one, The Erudite by Soma Design and I’ve taken the tracking code for both Sitemeter and Google Analytics off the site.

Let me explain. I’ve been thinking about a new theme for a little while. The old theme was really cool and was certainly an improvement over my past ones. However, it wasn’t quite “me” and it tended to be a little too busy for my tastes. About the same time I started thinking about a new theme, I started to think about what I really wanted to get out of writing here. Many of my posts aren’t particularly thoughtful and while I will probably never stop posting human Taser guinea pigs and people falling down escalators while a cat plays a keyboard, I’d like to focus more on my writing, on my thoughts on a variety of subjects and how I express those. Essentially, I’d like to improve my craft of writing and find out what my voice really is.

In a supreme case of serendipity, WordPress had a notification of some new themes up on the WordPress dashboard and I happened to see The Erudite one. It’s billed as a theme for writers and readers and clearly, it lives up to that billing. It’s very clean and the only thing to focus on is what’s written here. I decided to update to it and in the process, to stop worrying about how many people were visiting my site or what my daily average was (big decision for a data junkie). I’m just going to write and see what happens.

I hope that people continue to comment because I won’t really know you’re reading anymore (Hint: I knew some of you came here because I had your IP address or incoming domain name logged in Sitemeter. Like say if you came in to check out what I was writing while you were supposed to be working at SMU. 🙂 ) But even if people don’t, I’m hoping that by moving to a very clean, word focused blog design and removing the distraction of how many people were visiting on any given day, I can focus more on what I have to say. I’m attracted to other voices on the web who have thought provoking ideas and I’d like to join that small chorus with particular ideas of my own. We’ll see how it works out together.