Table of Contents:
The discerning visitor may notice that the site has had something of a major redecoration. The content has stayed the same, however the presentation has changed.
Why? I hear no-one ask. I’ll tell you…
The last look
The last template was magnificent (it was Themeisle’s Neve Pro), but it became a bit too heavy for my liking. I was running some content plugins that generated all sorts of post views and carousels and whatnot – which although looked very nice, weren’t really necessary. It started to become very wait-y – in other words, in order to make any minor template changes, I would have to wait a little while for the customization interface to open and sort itself out. If anything, I am impatient!
When I started this version of my “blogging magnum opus”, I did consider just a simple blog template and no frilly bits. However, I got swept up in website design fever and went down the pretty, but complicated route. Also expensive: content plugins and pro versions of templates aren’t cheap and they’re not getting any cheaper.
So I decided to chop it all back and return back to a simple blog style template with no frivolities. And that is where we are now.
Well, where are we now?
The front page is just a list of all the blog posts on the site in posted order. It paginates through until you reach the last post.
On the right, the sidebar has my social links, a search box (to type words in) a list of categories and finally the blog posts arranged by month (and year) posted. And that’s it.
The categories are new. I’ve grouped the tags into some generic top-level categories, in case anyone finds that useful. The tags still exist of course – and clicking on a tag returns a list of all posts with that tag.
There’s no colour picker (i.e. dark mode) any longer, it’s just eye blindingly white now. Sorry to anyone that liked the dark look (I did, incidentally!)
But it does run very, very quickly. After all, there are no plugins, or bloated templates to slow it down, so pages return very quickly indeed! It also works exceptionally well on tablets and mobiles too. No over complicated menu, no mucking about.
Finally – kudos and thanks to Anders Norén, who designed and built the original version of this template. We’ll see how we get on with it.
