A New Look for Opening Doors in Brick Walls

I’ve wanted to try a new theme for my blog for quite some time. I’ve seen a few themes I like but not enough to go through the “work” of switching. Too many format changes to the content would have to be made to make the theme work well for my blog.

I have a wiz-ee-wig 😉 obsession when writing my posts in draft mode. I know I should just write until I’m finished and then format. I’m always using the Preview button to see what the post looks like and to read through it searching for errors or possible re-writes.

From Twenty Ten to Twenty Sixteen

The year is nearly over and I decided to try the WordPress default theme for 2016: Twenty Sixteen. It took me several hours to customize the widgets, background, menus, headers, and fonts. I didn’t do it in one sitting. I put it aside several times, never closing the dashboard. There may be an easier way but I wanted to keep my old theme, Twenty Ten, active until I was satisfied with the new theme.

I became quite frustrated with the logo feature. Here I have what I think is a great logo – mainly because I made it all by myself – and it wasn’t showing up in the upper corner during the customization. In the end, after I had made all the changes to the menu and widgets, I went back to the headers and logo section, tried again, and it finally worked. The new theme went live last Wednesday and on Sunday I tweaked the size of the title to the dimensions available in the image field. Instead of using a picture I chose to make an image with the name of my blog in the fonts I used for my logo and hid the default title.

Some things which will have to be fixed

I haven’t gone through each post but I have found two issues that I will have to deal with.

I’m not liking the way my sources look compared to the rest of the post.

My sources (endnotes) no longer appear in small print. They are now in a larger size bold print. This will have to be fixed as most of my posts from last year, when I did the Luxembourgish families, have between 20-50 items in the endnotes. This does not look “neat and clean” like the rest of the blog.

This is how I’m thinking of re-doing all the sources.

I’ve fiddled around with solutions and have decided to switch the formatting to Paragraph (same as the rest of content) and then change the font color to a middle gray to set it off from the rest of the post.

Notice the numbering is too close to the side of the box.

Another difference I will have to get used to is the numbering in the Twenty Sixteen theme hangs the numbers or bullets to the left and places the text flush with the other content. I was used to the numbers/bullets being flush to the text and the rest being indented to the right. My boxes with the Genealogy Sketch have this numbering and the numbers are nearly attached to the left side of the box. I’ll be fixing these over the next few weeks.

Some things I love about this new theme

When quoting the old theme used indentation of the italicized text, This new theme still used italics, although the font size is a tiny bit larger. The text is flush with the rest of the content and sets it off with a thick vertical line to the left.

I like the way the quoted material is set apart with the thick vertical line.

The featured image in a post now shows up at the top of the post. I have a few ideas of how I am going to use this to my advantage. For example, a recurring image for posts in a series or using my collection of photographs of doors (like the one at the top of this post) or photos of signs of the towns an ancestor lived in. I think this may work really well since I am not using a photo at the top of my blog.

I’m ready for the New Year and my blog is ready for another year. If you are a blogger, have you recently updated or changed your blog’s theme? To all of my readers, I’d love to hear what you think of the new look.

© 2016, copyright Cathy Meder-Dempsey. All rights reserved.

Save

Save

Save

Save

Save

Save

Save

Save

Save