Thanks for a very nice Zen sub theme. I am trying to use it for news magazine website. After a great deal of search and research I found this theme super fast and easily customisable. However, I got stumped when I tried to add a region in the usual drupal way by declaring region in dot.info file and then adding those regions in page.tpl file with "php if ..div and end-if" clause. I keep getting error notice: Undefined variable .... in include. What else do we need to do more to create region?

Another thing about this theme - I want to ask : What if we don't want to use Google font? How to disable it? I have declared in my local css: body {font-family: "Open Sans",sans-serif;}. But still it waits for google font to download? Is there really any special advantage of google font- performance or seo wise? Beauty wise I see nothing special about it.
Please help.