Ta-da! Our website has been updated, and we are very pleased with the results. The WordPress Theme that was selected and installed by our technical service provider appears to be ideal for our purposes.
The new site retains the “magazine” format that worked well in the original site, and it has much greater design flexibility, and many more built-in features. This will allow us to constantly refresh and update the site over time.
Old Site Had Reached Its “Best Before Date”
The original site had definitely reached its best before date. The developer of the Theme was no longer providing updates, so it was not possible to present information in newer and more interesting ways. And quite frankly, several operational aspects had begun to fail.
Most irritating of the operational failures was that the site was no longer able to resize photos in our posts for the current generation of mobile devices. This meant that our viewers were faced with oddly stretched photos and were not able to fully appreciate our photo posts, – even in the workarounds we developed in an attempt to solve the problem.
A number of the articles had become difficult to read, especially on mobile devices. Again, we had to spend endless amounts of time trying to work around that problem as well. No more. The new theme 0ffers a much greater choice in fonts selection and text presentation. We are starting with the default fonts and approach, but you might well see this evolve over time.
The other thing that was particularly annoying to us, and certainly to our readers, was the large number of ads that “Google Ads” kept inserting on our pages. The old Theme had very little control over how or where they appeared. Hopefully, the new theme will give us much greater control over this and allow us to reduce the number of ads present on any page and prevent them from negatively impacting readability. To begin with, we are going to launch the new site with reduced numbers of Google Ads, and later modify the advertising placement.
Ads on website pages, as you are surely aware, are necessary to help mitigate operating costs. When you click on a Google ad it does provide some revenue for us, so thank you to those of you who have found something that appeared in an ad that interested you, and for clicking on it.
New Theme Benefits for Readers
The new Theme lets us present our posts in a number of completely different layouts. The one we have selected allows us to prominently display a couple of feature articles beside the slider that tells the story of what we are all about. The top right-hand frame will always display our most recent post. This allows regular readers to quickly check for new posts without having to scroll down through the site. Secondly, in the lower frame we are now able to share older articles (RETRO-REPOST) that are once again timely and relevant.
The newest addition that we are absolutely thrilled to announce is that the site now incorporates Google “Language Translation”. This feature allows the translation of our site into virtually any other language in the world. We have many European followers, and I am sure being able to read articles in a preferred language will be very helpful to them. The translation field appears at the top of the side bar, so it will be directly available in every post.
That brings us to another new feature that I think people will find useful. The side bar will now appear on the right-hand side of all our posts. This will mean that quick and alternative navigation through our site is easily accessible on every page. If you are looking for popular articles, or recent articles, or want to check out new comments on articles this can all be done via the ever-present sidebar.
The menu choices on the Header have expanded noticeably. You can now click on one link to go directly to the collected articles for any category. The drop-down menu for this purpose has been eliminated. More menu choices have been moved to the “Top Bar”, along with a couple that did not appear in the old main menu.
You will notice when you go into an individual post there is now the capacity to share the article on a variety of social media sites. Prior to this you would have to copy the address and go to your social media page and paste it in there to share it… A whole bunch of work, so it only rarely got done. These links appear at both the top and the bottom of the page.
Speaking about jumping into a post from the main page, we assumed one element of that process was terribly irritating to all our readers. To go to the full post, you had to click on the title of the post article. If you clicked on the photo image instead, all that happened was a copy of the image popped up. In the new theme, when you click anywhere on the frame you are sent directly to the article.
Benefits of Switching to a New Theme for Us
Many benefits for us have been achieved by switching to the new theme. In general, when creating a new post, the new theme allows us to do many of the things that previously took and immense amount of time and effort in a fraction of the time. Less time spent physically setting up articles for posting means more time for writing content for posts.
I will not bore you with the long and rigorous path it used to take to create a single post. However, I will share with you just one aspect to give you an idea of how the workload has been reduced.
When you arrived at the home page of our old site, you would see a thumbnail photo attached to each article. That image had to be a specific size. When you clicked and went into the article the title photo in the top right-hand corner, which was identical to the thumbnail, had to be a totally different size. And finally, photos embedded in the article needed to be yet another size. Most of these had to be sized by us prior to uploading them into the media gallery, which is where we would select them to be inserted into the post.
And each place a photo appeared, it had to be chosen and inserted individually. By way of example: photos had to be individually selected for the title, thumbnail, and social media purposes – individually, even if it meant selecting the exact same photo for all three. Yikes!
This new template allows us to upload just one large image to the media gallery. When we create a new post now, we simply click on a “set featured image” link, click on the image we want, and we are done. The theme automatically places and resizes that image for each role it is fulfilling. Huge time saver. And there are many other aspects of post building that are refreshingly faster in the new theme. Woo-Hoo!
The updating will continue through the first couple of months of the new website launch. We now must go back and tidy up all the photo and text workarounds so that all the posts appear the same. And we need in need to load in the main image for all the backdated posts. But we are REALLY looking forward to doing that. Enjoy!
Love to Hear from You
We would love to hear your take on our new site or about any issues that truly annoyed you about the old site. From here on, we are making a continuous effort to improve and make your visits to our site as stress free as possible.
Feel free to share your thoughts in the “Comments” section below, or by simply flipping us a quick email if you have lots to say… email link on the top bar of our header.
We hope you enjoy our new site as much as we did creating it for you.