A new website theme

After much tinkering with my new theme over this long weekend I think I’m now pretty much done… for now…

While I’d made the decision to get my own domain and self-host this website years ago, I’d still been using the same ‘free’ wordpress website theme to display Booklover Book Reviews for the entire time, changing the look every now and then by hacking at the same original underlying code.

What does that lead to? A coding framework that was sub-standard and very difficult for a non-programmer like myself to maintain and bug fix for every different browser type every time a plugin I was using got updated.

So I bit the bullet and decided to pay for a fully supported SEO-optimised framework and website theme. I ended up going with the Studiopress’ Genesis Framework and the eleven40-Pro child theme. It is mobile responsive and HTML5.

While there are still a couple of kinks I will address over time (utilise plugins better suited to this theme), in the main I found Studiopress’ help documentation very easy to follow and the out of the box setup quite simple. Most of the time I spent on it this weekend was related to my own customization – fonts, image sizings etc.

I succeeded in retaining my black, red and white theme and my BLBR site logo. In an ideal world I would make the navigation menu background red to get a bit more colour in view, but that would mean I’d need to change the font colour used in that navigation bar (currently red), and I am conscious that the more customization I do the further I’ll be moving from my original objective!

So far I am finding the interface really easy to use, and I’m hoping the clean lines, larger images, grid views and more navigation options make it a more enjoyable reading/browsing experience for you.

I have tested several browsers and as many of the viewing options I could think of, but inevitably I won’t have checked them all, so if you do come across something on my site that doesn’t work for you I’d be most grateful if you’d let me know.