I’m sure you’ve noticed that we’ve changed the WordPress theme for TheAtHomeCouple.com. While our previous theme was clean, easy to navigate through and user friendly it wasn’t very smooth in the back end – which is just as important. If you are looking to make an impact with your blog, whether it be socially or financially, it’s vital that your theme provides the necessary functionality and seamless integration of plugins, applications and multimedia – because that’s what web 2.0 is all about! Considering the niche we’re in, I had to force myself to sit back and analyze what our goals are individually, and as a couple, in order to provide the best experience for us and our community. (I’m sitting at a coffee shop writing this post as a parking officer is writing a ticket for a delivery van that just parked 3 minutes ago. This is why I don’t drive.) Enough spying.
Here are some points I jotted down while analyzing what this blogs “needs” are:
- We are very earthy people (hippie children) so that vibe needs to be portrayed tastefully.
- We want to help as many people as we can to make a living online, while helping ourselves, so the theme needs to have social bookmarking and networking functionality built-in so the word can spread in the click of a button.
- At least 2 side bars with a dedicated header and footer section for advertising, plugins, linking, and branding elements.
- Personally, I find icons to be extremely important to the user experience, especially the social bookmarking and RSS icons. Since we are using a template, rather than a custom theme, the icon scheme needs to be consistent and well placed for optimal interactivity.
- We collectively agreed to having a photo gallery section because we want our readers to get to know us, as well as giving you guys and gals the option to upload your own pictures and albums so we can get to know you (still not sure how I’m going to accomplish this fully).
- Knowing that we will eventually hire a professional designer to build us a custom theme with custom functionality, we need our current theme to last us at least 6 months to a year (hopefully less if things go as planned).
After going through our list of needs I realized that the old theme didn’t even come close to meeting our needs, so I spent about three hours yesterday downloading, uploading and testing various themes from some of my favorite sites like nattywp.com, premiumthemes.net, new-wordpress-themes.net, and dailyblogtips.com. After almost throwing our laptop across the room I eventually stumbled upon this wonderful new theme, Kayupress, and what a great theme it is (we think so at least).
It’s earthy, unique, and comes with full front and back end capabilities to meet all of our needs – and then some! The html is marked up beautifully, and it comes with the functionality of some of the more popular plugins built right in – all you have to do is download and activate. The only downside at this point is there are some grammar mistakes with the image files the author provided, which I’m sure you’ll find, but it’s nothing that a glass of scotch and a little Photoshop can’t fix, right?
I’m pretty much self taught when it comes to html, and haven’t even delved into the world of css just yet – so the next week or so should be interesting to say the least. Anyways, we’d love to know what you guys think of the new theme, and if you have any suggestions or applications you would like to see, let us know.
Cheers,
Elijah