This current theme has been on the go for about 10 months (since march 2009). I try to update the theme roughly once a year, just to keep things fresh. If you’re sick of the current theme, you can only imagine how i’m feeling – looking at it and working with it day in day out for the past 10 months 😉
Whilst it is pretty simple, it could be simpler. I want to put maximum focus on the content which will sit naked & exposed and force me in to improving it 🙂
Like any website, this one has flaws and i’ll list them now;
- The ads on this current theme are a bit tacky, so i also want to reduce the number of them & clean their appearance up.
- The social links at the top are too big, don’t deserve their high profile location and i don’t keep active profiles on all of the profiles i link to.
- The orange on white is a bit hard on the eyes.
- The footer area is a bit boring – no creativity in the design.
- There’s too many pages in the menu area – it’s getting cramped.
- Logo is too big, i could reduce its size or redesign it which would allow me to pull the content further up the page.
- Posts follow no real consistent structure… i said before i disliked magazine themes on a personal blog, but i’m beginning to think it makes more sense to cut off blog posts after a certain length and have a ‘read more’ link beside them… It means the homepage file size will stay consistent which allows me to optimise it for speed. Plus it looks less cluttered and really consistent / structured.
- Search function is rubbish on the current theme and for wordpress in general… i really need to integrate a custom google search engine…
- The feedback link of the side is hardly ever used. Could scrap it all together or just have it as a footer link.
So as you can see i don’t miss much… that critical approach ultimately improves the site because i’m upgrading it constantly… i’m confident i have good judgement and know what’s right / wrong. Implementing changes to make right the wrongs is another thing, but if i look at the changes i’ve made to this site or any other, stats have always increased after the change have been made, so that’s the incentive.