A New Blog Design

I hear you thinking! Not yet another blog design!

When I moved this blog to its own domain almost a year ago my old WordPress theme for WordPress.com wasn’t available on the WordPress.org site, where WordPress sites with its own domain are hosted. I just choose one that looked nice, but since I have always been looking for something better.

Already for years when I was searching for new themes, I did find the most wonderful themes for newsblogs, almost looking like a real newspaper or magazine. I never quite figured out how to do it, although I tried several times. When searching for it once again yesterday, I suddenly found this theme. And what more, it did have a really easy and simple tutorial, telling exactly how to do it.  Luckily I could keep the same colour scheme I used before.

It turned out this design by Mystery Themes was quite easy to create. No knowledge of HTML or CSS necessary. At first nothing showed up, until I figured out that all I had to do was creating a home page and set that one as home page template – if you know what I mean. Otherwise it wouldn’t show up on the front page. When looking at their support forum, I figured out I actually wasn’t the only one having had this small problem. I only needed a tiny bit of help from Sophie of AllThingsRoyal to remove the featured image that suddenly appeared on top of each post (unwanted).

I left out an extra featured posts bar below the upper slider, and left out the carousel at the bottom of the page – mainly because that would mean I’d have to change the size of each of the more than 250 featured images for this blog. Now I only did the four ones in the slider on top, as that was important for the general look of the forum. But who knows, if I ever have time for it!

Basically the blog didn’t change a lot.

  • On top of the blog you find the name of the blog and the menu. There is a tiny menu with social media icons in the upper corner on the right. Right below the blog name is the main menu of the blog, with attached the subitems.
  • New is the ticker with the latest posts.
  • Below that is a slider featuring the last four new posts.
  • Right below that you will no longer find the list with all the new posts. They are now divided into five categories, the same as you find in the menu. The last six posts per category are visible on the frontpage this way.
  • If you want to see more posts, you can either use the menu on top, or click on the category name above the last six posts.
  • On the right you find the sidebar with a bit of information about myself, the blog statistics, a form to subscribe to emails from this blog, the top posts of the blog, the last few comments and of course my favourite blogs. Here you can also choose the prefered language and let Google Translator translate the page. They might not always be accurate, but it can be helpful if your English is not very good.

In the menu I have added a contact form. It was there before, but a bit hidden in “about me”.

I’d love to know what you think about the new design. And if there are any problems, just let me know.

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