If you’ve been on the website at all lately, you may have noticed that I got a new WordPress theme. The old one wasn’t working the way that I wanted it to anymore, and it was looking a bit dated, so it was time for a change. I don’t have it 100% finished quite yet, so things will still continue to change here and there, but all the big stuff is done.

Changing this made me realize that I didn’t really understand how WordPress themes worked. This is my first theme change, and I was under the impression that if you want to change a theme, all you have to do is buy a new one and switch over to it. I didn’t realize that things are set up completely differently by different people, and it’s not necessarily that simple. It probably would have been easy if I bought a theme created by the same person, but since I didn’t, there was a lot more tweaking that had to happen than what I had expected. And since I didn’t realize this, I was working on everything directly on the website. I really should have had a dummy site set up to make all the changes on and then gone live when things were finished. Well, now I know, right?

I do really like this new theme though. It’s so clean and modern. And a lot of the back-end (or actually, the front-end of the back-end?) is really easy to use. There is a page builder that lets you quickly add parts to the site without having to code. And, since things like this don’t always work in the way you would like them to, it’s really easy to turn the page builder off to tweak some code. Turning it back on is also easy. I was really excited to realize this, since I had multiple portfolio pages that needed to be formatted in the same way, and it was 100 times faster to just copy and paste the code from page to page.

In case you are interested, the new theme is Yaga. The simplicity is what drew me to the theme, but I also liked all of the options that it offered. My favorite feature is that I can put text within my portfolio, along with multiple images. My previous theme just had a light box setup for the portfolio, and without text or multiple views, I don’t feel that some of my portfolio pieces worked well. There are pieces that I choose that are not my favorite, but they really showcase a specific skill. Without text to explain it, it just looks like a poor choice.

One thing that I’m still struggling with in this theme is my logo. My most recent logo is a square shape, and this theme really works better with a horizontal rectangle. I’ve been trying to redo it using calligraphy, instead of the font that I was previously using. But it looks so much better to me as a square. But I’ll figure something out eventually. In the meantime, at least my name is on there, right?