A New Year - Time for a New WordPress Theme
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Hopefully, you have noticed that the site has a new look and feel as of the New Year due to the New WordPress Theme.
In full disclosure, some of the products listed below may contain “affiliate links", which means I may receive (a fairly small) commission if you make a purchase through the link, but there is no additional cost to you. Please consider doing so as a way to help support this site and the work that I do.
I have been working for some time on updating my site to a New WordPress Theme to make it a bit easier for you to use as well as for me to maintain!
My prior site used the Arthemia Theme by Colorlabs, which was a great "starter theme" and one that I still recommend. Its many built-in features allowed me to quickly develop my site without needing to know too much about the back-end, "coding", side of WordPress.
But, as time went on, and I created more posts and visited more sites, I wanted a New WordPress Theme that had more "white space".
There were also a few features and styling changes I wanted to implement that were going to require the use of a additional WordPress plug-ins or custom coding, things I wanted to avoid.
Because my site is very much a part-time endeavor for me, I wanted to keep things as easy as possible from a site management perspective.
I want to make sure I spend my time creating content about Email Overload and Productivity issues (my areas of interest and passion), not dealing with configuration or coding issues.
I even considered moving to a fully managed system such as Squarespace or Weebly, but in the end, decided to stay with WordPress since I had already gone through much of it's "learning curve".
After a bit of searching, I decided to switch to Inovado from Themeforest as my New WordPress Theme.
Inovado was a theme I had seen on a fellow blogger's site and really liked its "look and feel".
It's a nice "middle of the road" theme that has a "clean look", new options, and several features I can implement in the future (as time permits).
I'm still making some changes and tweaks since it went into place, but the key things you will see are:
- More "white space" on all the pages.
- Cleaner and clearer text and images.
- Redesigned and sleeker top menu.
- A new "Get Started" page.
- Streamlined the "Sidebars" (and removed them from a few pages).
- A new "30 Best Tips eBook" page under "Tips".
- "Productivity Tools" and "WordPress Site Tools" pages in "Resources".
- Integrated "Social Sharing" and "Follow" features.
- Removed the "pop-up" to join the mailing list. (Everyone says they "work", but I hate them when I visit other sites, so I didn't want to be a hypocrite by having them on my site!)
- "Behind the scenes", Inovado has a number of built-in options and features that help me to manage the site more easily and create posts more quickly - a key concern for a "part-timer" like me!
If you are interested in learning more about the various tools and services I used to create this site, please feel free to visit my WordPress Site Tools page.
What do you think of the site update?
Anything you would suggest I add, remove, or change?
Do you think it is an improvement over the prior site?
Feel free to comment below and let me know what you think!
In full disclosure, some of the products listed on this page may contain “affiliate links", which means I may receive (a fairly small) commission if you make a purchase through the link, but there is no additional cost to you. Please consider doing so as a way to help support this site and the work that I do.
