For a while, I’ve been annoyed by some of the quirks and foibles of the design of my site.
I won’t get into the details of what I was annoyed about – it’s not important – but it’s been something nagging at the back of my head for a while.
The basic source of the annoyance was, fundamentally, my own lack of knowledge and experience with WordPress when I started. Since, at the time, I was consumed by a whirlwind of writing I was doing / recovering from, I didn’t have the spare mental energy I could devote to learning WP and making the site “pretty enough“. Consequently, I did what just about everyone does in a similar situation – I hired someone to put a site design together for me.
And … it worked. Well, perhaps better to say it was work-able?
It did what I needed it to do. However, as time progressed and I was adding more and doing more, the cracks started to show.
Throwing it all at the wall
Finally, this past week, I reached the point where I just wanted things to look differently (“better”) and I wanted some features to work which weren’t (I discovered) compatible with the WP theme I’d been using.
I spent some time cloning my site to create some staging versions (sample versions with all the same stuff, but so I could rebuild the framework around it without it affecting the real nowherepub.site. Once I knew what I wanted to do (and the best route to get there on the live site), I bit the bullet and made the real changes.
The end result is … as you see now.
So? What’s Changed?
Visuals
First off, the overall “look” is different, due to a new WordPress Theme.
I’m using the Simple Writer PRO theme from ThemesDNA.com. [There’s a free version as well, but I wanted the additional features of the PRO version.]
Additionally, there’s now a working sidebar, containing Search, the various post categories (“Drink Selections”), what I’m reading IRL (from goodreads.com), the 3 most recent posts, and a couple of social links (not nearly all of them, though).
Internals
I restructured the categories, somewhat. There had been a “super-parent” category, “Blog”, which I realized, ultimately, made no sense. After all – all the posts here are “The Blog™”. Now, everything actually should make sense for where it is.
Also, the top menu items were adjusted slightly. While the menu items themselves took you to relevant pages, I’m not sure that was entirely clear, even with the “Navigation” note at the top of the home page.
