What better way to kick things off for the year 2009 than to introduce our new design, packed with a better user interface and a few powerful and handy features. It took us a very long time to locate a good WordPress theme which we could customize to fit our needs, but our final search lead us to the Starscape Theme. This theme had everything we were looking for and more.

With this new layout we wanted to:

- have the ability to easily customize the look of the site
- allow visitors to navigate with ease and fast speed through our content
- implement powerful & useful features for the admins and the visitors
- improve the overall speed of the site
- implement digg.com features
- improve users ability to comment and discus our posts
- have the ability to receive user feedback
- allow users to interact with the content instead of simply viewing it
- and believe it or not, we wanted to have a wicked banner!

That was our mission and to see exactly how we managed to accomplish our goals you should continue to read the post below where we provide you screenshots of the new features and some information of how they function.

NOTE: We would be very happy if you gave us comments about what you think of the new design and the new features. All positive and negative opinions are welcomed and we will take everything you say under consideration for future designs for 1VIBE.NET. Thank you!

USER RATING SYSTEM FOR POSTS:

Its one thing for us to share our expert opinion’s about the content that we post but what about the opinions of all the people who visit 1VIBE.NET? The best way to find out what posts/stories are the hottest or most interesting is to allow each user to rate the posts themselves. This feature allows “REGISTERED USERS” only to rate each post they wish to comment on. We wanted only registered users to contribute as we consider these users loyal and their opinions and contributions to the site matter to us.

SUBMIT OR RATE POSTS TO DIGG.COM

Digg.com is a website where user’s vote (digg) popular content (everything from music to politics). The website has massive amount’s of traffic that is all up for grabs for the stories that make it to the front page. We wanted to have the ability to give our user’s the chance to share our stories on the site, and even Digg them to help us get to the top and receive more traffic and grow quicker.

VISITOR GENERATED AVERAGE BLOG RATING:

This was one of the most interesting features that we believe will be very useful to us. Remember the post rating system we spoke about above. Well to make sense of all of the results, this features takes the average rating of all posts and gives us a final ratio. Our goal is to maintain a website with at least a 5 out 10 average rating. This also allows us to see if what we post interests our users or not and make the necessary changes to satisfy your entertainment experience.

NUMBERED PAGE NAVIGATION:

Most WordPress theme’s would only allow you to view “Previous Page” or “More Posts” or “Next Page” which limits the navigation/browsing power that the user has. With numbered pages you are now able to jump to any page you desire without having to skip them one by one.

AUTOMATICALLY GENERATED RELATED & RECENT POSTS:

When viewing each post completely (clicking on a post title, which is also the page where you comment) we wanted user’s to also be able to quickly take a look at some related posts similar to what they are looking at and also present them with the most recent posts without having to navigate to other areas of the website. Although these are fun and useful features they are “automatically” generated which limits their accuracy but after evaluating them, we concluded that they would useful to our users.

These are some of the key features which we have implemented with this new design. The theme also has given the admins very powerful features to use in the backend side of the website. We hope that you like what you see and that you will give us all of your recommendations and share any thoughts you have about our new site.