Yes the comment form is tall. This is the theme’s default setup, not my design. I do intend to tweak it, but for the record, on my screen which is only 800 pixels tall, i can see everything from the “Leave Your Own Comment” heading down to the Submit button and the “Notify me…” check box on one screen. Just sayin’

The header doesn’t feel too tall to me (what is it with you and hating tall headers? (6)) This theme emphasizes white space, so its really not a “tall” header, its just spacious. I like it. I might tweak it a bit, but don’t expect to see it too much smaller.

Concerning the search box, NO ONE uses the search box on my blog. I know I’ve definitely never used a search box on someone’s personal blog. I tend to use Google Reader’s search. If I’m looking for something on a blog, chances are highly like it’s a blog to which I am subscribed. I’m ok with my search box being out of the way at the bottom of the screen. When you don’t have a sidebar to work with, search needs to go in either the header or footer. The footer is a better solution than letting an unused search box eat up valuable first-screenful real estate in the header. I’d much rather have the extra whitespace in the header.

My permalinks are handled by the All in One SEO pack plugin. It handles the redirection thing just fine. That plugin (and this permalink structure) has done wonders for my search engine rank. http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/all-in-one-seo-pack/ I’m currently the 4th result returned by the “Kenneth Wilson” query. I used to be on the 3rd page of results (behind Nobel winners and lawyers and car dealers).

The header is rather tall too, IMO.

And why’s the search button at the top redirect you all the way to the bottom? Novel, but I dunno. I kinda side with Mark Pilgrim on this one: “Site search form? Already exposed via OpenSearch. Axed. (This is a bit harsh. I suspect very few people know what it means when their search box starts blushing blue — that they can drop down the list of search providers and add a site search. But my access logs show very few people use my site search in the first place; many, many more people simply use a general-purpose search engine with the words “diveintomark” or “mark pilgrim” appended to their query.)”

I like dated permalinks, but these are good too. Hopefully you made sure the old permalinks still work? If not, perhaps the Redirection plugin would be useful to you: http://urbangiraffe.com/plugins/redirection/

Granted, I would take some offense to you saying these sorts of things about my current design, so feel free to delete this comment.

Aahh, now I get it