Tour of our NEW Responsive Blog Template

premium template

Those who regularly visit Artpromotivate have undoubtedly noticed a HUGE change here in the past 24 hours. I have updated this website's design with a brand new premium Blogger template. This is a responsive template named Sevida. Responsive templates are very popular with website designers these days. A responsive template is compatible with all mobile devices, screen sizes and browsers. I am aware that many of our readers view this blog through mobile devices, so I made the wise choice of switching out the old design for a new updated look.

I am VERY excited about this change! With the growing number of articles here (about 600), I realized how much a change was needed. The old design was limiting and cluttered - and many times slow loading. So there were some things that I was searching for in a new design.

User friendly – By user friendly, I mean that the template should make it very easy for users to navigate the website.
Easy to find articles – I was looking for a template which had several ways to search for, or stumble upon articles.
Responsiveness – This of course is very important. The template had to be compatible with all devices, unlike the old template.
Emphasis on images – Images are an essential part of website design. They encourage clickthroughs more than just plain links. For a blog centered on art, it was important that images be held at a higher priority than overall design.

Now that I have explained some of the reasoning for changing the design of Artpromotivate, a tour of the site is in order.

Tour of Artpromotivate’s NEW Design

Archive page – Click the archive link at the top of any page to be brought to a special search page. Here, you can sort by Latest Published, Latest Update or Category. You can also enter search terms, and perform a search for a certain topic.
JSON Search - At the top, right is the search box. Go ahead and type something in, then click the search icon. Results will load in a popup just below the search box, instead of opening on another page, as in the past template! Pretty cool!
Latest NEWS! - Directly below this is an awesome new NEWS TICKER. This displays the most recent posts with a cool animation. If you get tired of the animation, you can pause it anytime. You can also use the buttons to go forward or backward.
JSON Slideshow – The slideshows display a selection of random posts every time the homepage is loaded. I have it set to show only posts with the “Artist Spotlight” tag. This one can also be forwarded or reversed. Click on an image to be taken directly to the post.

You will notice that some of the images are very distorted. This is because they automatically resize to fit the slideshow. This does not bother me that much, as this should encourage people to see a better image within the post. The slideshow also selects the first image from each post, so from now on I will be displaying introductory images with the approximate dimensions of the slideshow and image previews.
Latest posts with two views. Get two different views of latest posts by selecting either the list or grid icon on the right (grid is shown by default). Hit the Load More Posts button below this to see even more recent articles.

Click the arrows beside Latest Posts to bring up categories. Here, you can select a category and view a list of most recent posts with that tag. These results can also be viewed by list or grid.
There are many more cool new features here, but I will leave it up to you to explore. Check out the related posts sections and cool new emoticons for commenting, both found only on post pages.