A New Look For Capitol Annex

If there is anything that changes more often than Texas weather, it is the look of Capitol Annex. Over the years, we’ve gone through six themes (not counting the themes we went through in December 2006 and early January 2007 when this site was powered by Drupal), making today’s redesign Capitol Annex’s seventh.

We had planned on keeping the look of Capitol Annex the same through the 2008 election cycle. However, a couple of problems with our other template made today’s changes necessary. The template had several problems on the “back end” that weren’t visible to readers but which may have negatively impacted our ranking in Google.

For the most part, our sidebar content remains intact. We did delete a few items and may delete a few more as the the new redesign gets “field tested” by our readers. One new thing about this redesign (although readers won’t likely notice the change) is that the Capitol Annex sidebars are now fully “widgetized,” meaning that, instead of coding the sidebars within the files of the template, we’ve made full use of WordPress’s widget function, which was made a part of WordPress’s features several releases back.

Another change to Capitol Annex behind the scenes that readers likely won’t notice is that all of the site’s feeds are now handled through FeedBurner, via a WordPress plugin. If you have subscribed to our RSS feed in a reader such as Bloglines, you shouldn’t notice any difference.

As always, your comments on the redesign are welcome. Please feel free to leave them in the comments on this post.

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