HellBound Bloggers (HBB) Now Revamped With Swift Theme

HellBound Bloggers (HBB) has been revamped with the popular Swift Theme. This is so far the best theme I have used and special thanks to the developer Satish Gandham for the wonderful design made according to HBB‘s needs. I hope you can experience a new feel and you can easily focus more on the content.

Why Revamped?

Almost one year back we redesigned our blog, we believed HBB needed a new and simple look to concentrate more on content. Our previous theme focussed more on Advertisements and Social Sharing, that’s because we targeted those two things specifically earlier.

Few words from Satish Gandham regarding this theme revamp,

Satish GandhamHBB was growing at a rapid pace, but the design was not perfect. Attention to detail was missing, as a designer it doesn’t feel right to see the one of the top blogs in India with that design.

I explained Pradeep how the design could be improved and we started working on the redesign in the mid September. The aim was to preserve the overall feel of the site and fix the things that were not right. Today, here we are to present you the new design for HBB powered by Swift.

You can see some of the changes we made on our blog below.

Updated Sections on HBB

Social networking enabled comment system

We switched to Jetpack (from WordPress.com) to provide a social networking comment experience. Now readers can also comment via Facebook, Twitter and WordPress.com accounts.

Simple Navigation Menu

On our previous theme we had 3 navigation menus, but now we are using only one menu with dropdown. You can find all the popular topics on our blog there. That helps readers to find engaging topics quite easily.

Random Button

Sometimes readers feel quite bored when they visit blogs because they want to read something but not sure where to start (except the recent post, of course). So a “Random Post” button could be essential there. Just click the button and you’ll be taken to a random post. Not satisfied? You can again click the button to read another one. On the sidebar also you can find the list of random posts.

Featured Boxes

On our previous theme we had 2 featured boxes for highlighting important posts or trending posts from categories. Now we added another one and made it 3 for extra exposure.

Popular Posts – Sidebar

If you want to read the recent popular posts on HBB, you can find them on the sidebar. If in case you missed quite trending posts, you can always find them on the sidebar.

Exclusive Search Box

We now focus on user experience on our site, so that readers and visitors can stay longer on our site. We kept a powerful search box on the header to help users to search for their required posts and resources.

Ad-free Layout

We reduced the locations for advertisements. We are thinking of a different way to monetize HBB apart from advertisements. So from now on you’ll see less ads.

Responsive Web Design

Responsive Web Design provides an optimal viewing experience for readers. Our theme will support wide range of devices to make reading more comfortable.


About Swift Themes

swift themesLike I said, using Swift Theme made us believe that we can take our blog to next level in terms of user experience and content providing. It is a fast and server friendly theme. The best part is you have full control over the design. Some other things you’ll love:

  • Search Engine Optimized with HTML5 semantics.
  • Good Google Page Speed Score and Yahoo! YSlow Metric Grade.
  • Full control over design. Highly customizable.
  • Excellent support from the Developer.

So far HBB’s overall loading and optimization performance are quite good, I’ll write a detailed review about our change and experience next week. A feature I liked the most is the delayed loading of Gravatars. That means the Gravtars are loaded only after the entire page is loaded. What’s the benefit? It won’t slow down the page load if it can not connect to Gravatar.com, which usually is slow.

It wont interfere with the user experience (UX) as by the time user comes to comments, they will be loaded.

You can also check our previous review about Swift Theme.

People asked me why not Thesis or Genesis? I asked them back why not Swift Theme? It is a popular fast loading WordPress theme with Top notch Search Engine Optimization.

Your Opinions

We value your feedback. I’m sure this new look is far better than our previous one and you’ll love it. But I could have missed something more essential you guys expected. Do share your views on comments below. Thank you. πŸ™‚

51 thoughts on “HellBound Bloggers (HBB) Now Revamped With Swift Theme”

  1. Nice theme,
    More if you make menu a lil but more in height… well just a suggestion..

    BTW nice sticky menu bar, thinking to do same with my blog too :-p

    Reply
  2. Hi Pradeep, I just wanted to jump in and say that your new theme looks awesome.
    HBB is looking better then ever.
    You’re building a brand here, keep up the great work πŸ™‚

    Reply
  3. Hi Pradeep,

    Awesome Design. Though I like Thesis Framework still and Thesis 2.0 Just Rocked the WP. Though Swift is also good and one of the best alternative of Thesis. πŸ™‚

    Thanks and Regards,
    GetPRed.com

    Reply
  4. Hi Pradeep,
    Glad to see a new look for HBB. Loved the new single navigation bar. Would have been nice if there was some breathing space between logo and navigation. It looks jam-packed with so many icons and links sticking together.
    Talking about the overall look and feel, it looks good to me on Single Post. Home page still looks busy.
    Also, I ntoiced that the featured posts’ images are resized using width and height attributes which is not a good practice.
    Lastly, you can replace search with Google search. WP search doesn’t return relevant results. For e.g. try searching “digg digg” πŸ™‚
    Oh and one more thing, since you are already using Jetpack, how about using it’s social share icons ?
    i hope, I haven’t offended you with my comment. πŸ™‚

    Reply
    • Absolutely no offense bro. Thanks for the feedback. All the suggestions you mentioned were about to fixed bro, except the logo and navigation space. πŸ˜€ But I’ll work on that too. Thanks for the feedback. πŸ™‚

      Reply
  5. Hey bro hbb looks and feels great πŸ™‚ . One thing i thought was u could work on the fonts on top below the logo.

    Reply
  6. Simple WordPress theme.Combination of White and Blue.Side bar is wider than previous theme ( I think ) …All other look great especially blogger bio…

    Reply
    • Thanks bro, this is the best choice I made for HBB. One special feature about this “Swift Theme” is the delayed loading of Gravatars. They will load only after the entire page is loaded. πŸ™‚

      Reply
  7. Hii Pradeep
    Homepage superb look but when i open any post then your sidebar look not gud work on sidebar recent posts image…
    Gud luck

    Reply
  8. awesome design bro, this is looking cool compared to previous one, i think specially new bloggers have to use this because they don’t have ads.

    Reply
  9. Hi Pradeep,

    Well done – Personally, It looks better. And change is a good thing, every now and then. With the new look and feel the UX personally seems to be a lot more fluent, yet still visually attractive. Great job, compliments on the new theme.

    Reply
  10. Superb theme design, author bio box, highlighted search box at top, stretched Sidebar etc. It’s really looking very impressive n professional.

    Reply
  11. Looks very impressive, but still need to fix few minor things like the sidebar in home and the twitter feeds at the bottom of the post. Else everything is great.

    Reply
  12. Theme super πŸ˜€ Stick side bar is missing , Sathish is awesome and he releases every month new updates πŸ˜‰ so you just relax and enjoy more more theme features.

    Cheers

    Reply
  13. Hi Pradeep.
    The theme looks great. Reducing the Advertisements space is a good step and now it looks more spacious then before.
    Cheers mate and the design rocks !!!!

    Reply

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