Come check out my new blog design
I finally found a clean, minimalist design that focuses on the writing–In fact, it’s named “Write.” No sidebar; the text is centered for easy reading, with everything extra shoved to the bottom. (And my URLs are finally underlined again! 🙂 )
I’ve wanted this for some time, for several reasons:
- make the page load faster (makes readers and Google happy–seriously, more than 3 seconds=terribly s l o w)
- get better scores on page performance
- focus the eye on the posts and not the stuff in the sidebar
- I like sites which load up quickly and have few annoying, distracting graphics
- I like the clean look of stripped-down sites optimized for mobile users
- I’m jealous of my HTML index page (the portal to all parts of my domain) because it’s clean and loads fast, unlike my WordPress sites 😛
I’ve also been looking at AMP lately, Google’s idea to make the Web load faster for mobile devices, but at the moment it doesn’t support all the stuff I need, such as Statcounter and my ad boxes. They’re working on that, but not there yet. Some developers are suspicious of AMP (also here), and say it’s better to fix your code so it loads faster.
Also, a recent experiment with Cloudflare’s Rocket Loader led to loading in under 2 seconds, but the “like” button disappeared. Despite trying all the code and fixes I found on the Net, nothing fixed that. So…I went looking for minimalist themes again.
I just spent all evening working on the new theme, transferring the widgets from the old one and making sure all the coding works. (Thanks to WP-Spamshield for telling me how to set up a debugger that you can keep running without exposing your errors to the whole Net! Without it, I never would’ve known some of the code was deprecated and causing hundreds of PHP errors. But I fixed it. 🙂 )
But enough of geeking out about my website. Check it out, and tell me in the comments what you think. 🙂
Also, please let me know if it would be better with or without a header image.
I don’t know which way to go. I like it without, because it focuses on the writing and images take longer to load. But then it seems bare and I don’t know if my readers would like that. 🙂 You can see here how the theme looks without.