I don’t know if I’m like the cobbler’s kid, who never gets new shoes, or like the designer’s house which is never the same for two months in a row.
I’m tired of this current theme:
- too few words fit on a page
- content starts too low … half-way down a page on a typical screen
- it’s not cool/edgy/sexy/web 2.0 enough
- it’s been a whole 4 months … I need something new!
So …. I’ll be moving to a new design in just few days. If you want a sneak peek, I’m using my low-traffic fishcrackers blog as a testbed while I work all the kinks out.
Since it may be helpful for others as well, I’ve listed 7 things to do when switching blog themes.
When switching your theme:
- back up your current blog: database and files. This is important – updating is tricky business and you need a known good downgrade path!
- choose/build a new theme (err … duh!)
- remove all the elements you don’t want … get rid of the clutter!
- customize the theme to your identity (colors, logo, name)
- ensure you have all the plugins ready that you want
- check if you have to revamp some of your static pages to fit the new theme
- test all the components of the theme and blog pages to ensure everything works. This is important – different themes contain different code, and you can’t assume they’ll just work.
Hopefully, I’ll have the site updates up this week. But I’ll be taking it slow … ensuring that everything is working, so that may change.
Change is good!
[tags] blogging, theme, new, design, wordpress, plugins, akismet, simpletags, related posts, technorati tags, category cloud, wp-notable, john koetsier [/tags]