Today’s exercise for the WordPress Blogging 101 course is called “Love Your Theme”, challenging you to try out different themes. I don’t really need to do this exercise - you know why? Because I’ve tried just about every theme available. And you think I’m joking…
As mentioned in previous posts - my blog hasn’t always lived at WordPress. For a long time I self hosted it on my own webspace, and for an even longer time it was elsewhere entirely - Blogger, Posterous, Posthaven, Tumblr, Ghost, and so on. Partly thanks to being a web developer in the daytime, I have been known to create my own blog themes entirely from scratch - but there comes a time when you realise you’re spending more time tinkering than writing - not good. What theme do I use ? I use the “Twenty Fifteen” theme - the new one WordPress launched late last year. It’s clean, tidy, and targeted at making content the centre of attention - which makes a lot of sense for an online journal. There are aspects of it I don’t like, that could be fixed with a tweak to the CSS, but in the grand scheme of things they really aren’t that important. What themes have I used in the past? I’m not going to listall of them, because we would be here all day - but I will make a couple of noteable mentions.
For a long time I used the “Ascetica” theme. It works wonderfully for long-form written content, and has lots of room in the sidebar for widgets, without distracting from the content too much. It uses serif typefaces (which are easier to scan within blocks of text than sanserif - did you know that?), and is very elegent.
Other themes worthy of a mention are the famous “Twenty Ten” theme that lots of people still use, and “Twenty Thirteen”. If you really look at them, it could be argued that Twenty Fifteen shares a lot of DNA with Ten and Thirteen - there are lots of similarities in their minimalist design, and presentation of featured images. Does itreally matter? As long as your posts are easy to read, I don’t think the theme really matters at all. Marketing idiots will wax lyrical about projectingyour personality, but I don’t think most people take a blind bit of notice. When you visit a magazine or news website, they are loaded with advertising in every spare inch of the screen - and we never notice any of it (unless it’s a pop-up ad, which causes us to leave the site immediately - when will they learn?).
I think maybe the only people worried about the theme used by a blog are the authors themselves. Given that WordPress is heading in the same direction as Tumblr in presenting posts to the community through a dashboard interface, and the number of people reading through feed agggregators, the theme is almost redundant. That doesn’t stop us obsessing over the fonts, the line spacing, the widgets, and the photos though…