A few days ago my admin team took notice that the theme we were using for this site hasn’t been updated in almost three years. Even though everything was pretty much working the way it should, that also means we weren’t getting any new features, some of which are getting pretty common around the web these days. With that in mind, we set off to find a new one that hit has many of the check boxes as possible. We wanted something that would still work well in a blog type of site as well as a theme that was more responsive to different browsers and screen sizes.
So this is what we found…
First off, this is a test. Probably a long term one. Even though the themes do offer a stock preview as well as a live preview, they don’t always show exactly how things will work until it’s actually been installed and all of the tweaks are made to the site to fit the new theme. Based on those previews, this theme was selected and those tweaks are now in progress. Actually, a lot of them have been done already in the past 24 hours. If you’ve visited in that short time frame, you’ve probably seen all kinds of weird things and those things have probably changed every time you went to a new page. That was us hard at work here.
So, what changed then? First, and most obviously, the overall look and feel. (Note that if you’re viewing on a phone, things probably look about the same. For the full effect, you’ll need an actual computer, if anybody still uses one of those. So far it seems that tablets are showing most of the things.) We’ve kept our title and tagline at the top because we like it that way. The menu was branched out a little so you can jump right to what you want as far as the videos and pictures are concerned. There are getting to be more and more pictures, so you’ll have to go to the picture page to select a timeframe. We like how it cleans up that menu. The slider with cover images is new (you can’t miss it!). While it doesn’t serve a real purpose for us, it’s kind of cool so we’ll probably keep it around. The posts show up in a two column grid now and I think that automatically adjust to one column if you’re using a smaller screen or have a browser sidebar open. The posts automatically show an excerpt now (did you see the ellipsis in brackets?) and there’s a READ MORE button towards the bottom. We were putting those in manually before, so hopefully those two systems will play nicely with each other or there’ll be a lot of old post editing in somebody’s future. Did you notice the animations when you mouse over a picture or the menus? How about how the menu bar stays at the top when you scroll (you might need a computer for those)? Cool stuff and all included for free. The sidebar has a few new things, some old things gone and all in a different order. There’s a subscribe option right at the top and you don’t need to rely on the post comment options (I have a feeling those were confusing for some people and hard to find for everybody). That subscribe system is different that the one old and hasn’t been tested yet, so we’ll have to see how that plays out. Some of the items were placed into menu to help clean things up a bit and the three tabs for Popular, Recent and Comments are based on your visits, so as people start looking around and clicking things, those should populate automatically. The old Top Posts & Pages is still there for now in case anybody actually used it. Also, both search areas (in the right side sidebar and in the menu bar) should both work and I would hope display the same results.
Just a couple highlights on the post pages themselves… There’s kind of a navigation level bar at the top (kind of like the directory tree in your file browser) and a similar posts section at the bottom if there are other posts that have pretty close matches on their tags. (Yes you can still browse any and all posts by their category and tags just as you did before.) We are aware that there are duplicate sharing buttons on the post pages, but that’s something that’ll get taken care of later as we keep polishing things up. (Did anybody use those anyway?)
With that overview in mind, go ahead and click around, try stuff out. There are some other new little things hidden here and there and some of the old stuff is gone (but nothing major we think). Depending on how you view, it might take a little time to get used to things, but so far it’s looking like the change is for the better (or at least now that some of the adjustments have been made).
