We Got Us a Facelift, Ned!


Extreme Makeover House - Boardman, OH

I spent a bit of time over the last week or so doing some modifications to the way this site looks. It’s never been a terribly ornate site in terms of design (mostly because I could design myself out of a wet paper sack), but ever since I moved the site away from Tumblr and to a self-hosted WordPress installation, I’ve wanted to dress it up a little bit. The current site look-and-feel represents the first phase of this “dressing up” process.

For the past year or so, this site has run on a premium WordPress theme called Thesis. Let me go on the record as saying that I’m a big fan of Thesis because you get a great deal of control without ever having to write any code, particularly when it comes to adding new page elements and rearranging the site as a whole. It’s a great theme and totally worth the cheddar.

But I found a theme I like much better: Headway.

It’s got a lot of the same features as Thesis, but offers a great deal more functionality in terms of modifying things like colors and larger page elements. The best part? The current version of the site was built using almost zero HTML or PHP written by me. The only code I had to write myself was a little bit of HTML to style the newsletter signup form at the bottom of the single post page. Otherwise, the whole thing was built using Headway’s kick-ass visual configuration tool. You click an element anywhere on the page and you’re able to do basic CSS modifications by simple clicking the available options. It’s freaking grand.

You may also notice a pretty bare right gutter — this is absolutely intentional. As of now, there are exactly three things over there: a signup form for my newsletter (which is going to become a major part of my little publishing empire, so signing up might be a good idea if you like what I’m doing here), a link to the landing page for Evernote Essentials and that big old Facebook thing. The Facebook widget is there because a) folks seem to like it and b) I couldn’t find a better place for it. All the other stuff that used to be there got poop-canned in favor of a simpler layout.

So anyway, things are changing around here and this is the first batch of updates. Expect other new stuff in the very near future. And if you’re looking for a really great WordPress theme that’s über-friendly to non-nerds, I’d highly recommend Headway.

Thanks for reading!

P.S. - The links to Thesis and Headway in this post are affiliate links. If that makes you squeamish, you can use these links, which are not affiliate links: Thesis, Headway.

Photo by Triple7

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