Just a few weeks behind schedule, but a long time in the works, I’ve finally pushed the new WordPress theme for Ardamis live. Basic and elegant (I’m trying to establish a trend here), the theme also should outperform its predecessors in both page load times and SEO-potential. The index and archive pages should appear more consistent, and all pages should provide more complete structured data markup (schema.org as well as microformats.org). The comment form has been outfitted with an improved approach to reducing comment spam.

The new theme is pretty light on the graphics, due to increased browser support for and subsequently greater use of CSS3 goodness for box shadows and gradients. I’ve reduced the number of image files to two: a background and a sprites file.

Only half-implemented in the previous theme, the new look, “Joy”, makes much better use of structured data markup, or microdata. Google is absolutely looking for ways to display your pages’ semantic markup in its results, so you may as well get on board.

The frequency of spam comments increased dramatically over the past two months, according to my Akismet stats, so I’ve gone back to the drawing board and developed a better front-line defense against them. The new method should be more opaque to bots that parse JavaScript while still being invisible to human visitors leaving legitimate comments.

In sum, I think Ardamis should be leaner, faster, and smarter (and maybe prettier) in 2012 than ever before.