You may have noticed that I changed the design of KevinMuldoon.com a few days ago. It was something that I had been meaning to do for a while as I was a little bored with the previous design.
There was nothing wrong with the last design per say. I just felt that it had too much spacing and I had set the featured images to be too large. Both of these issues could have been easily changed through the stylesheet and settings area; however I had been using the design since May 2013, so it was time for a change.
In my search for a new design, I looked at over a thousand WordPress themes. My initial thought was to go with something minimal. One of the themes I tested was Leo Babauta’s ZenHabits theme. The design is the definition of minimal. It has beautiful typography, no sidebar, and no unnecessary features.
After playing around with the design a little, I felt that it was not suitable for this blog due to the lack of sidebar. This would make navigating this blog a little more difficult. A sidebar can easily be added to the theme, so I would never rule out me using the design in the future.
I also tested the Naked WordPress Theme. Unfortunately, I could not get the design the way I wanted, so I looked elsewhere.
It did not take long for my search for a new WordPress theme to change from optimism to frustration. I looked through several hundred designs on ThemeForest alone, but every design seemed to excel in one area, but fall behind in another.
I also checked out a lot of Genesis child themes at StudioPress, but they have not released any suitable blog designs in a while. After testing many more free designs and premium themes I had purchased past, I downloaded the Minimum Pro child theme for Genesis. Before I had switched to the Metro Pro theme last year, I had been using the Minimum child theme for over six months. Since then, the design has been tweaked a little and had its name changed from Minimum to Minimum Pro.
After playing around with the design a little, I realised that it had everything I was looking for. I made a few small changes to the design such as adding a newsletter subscription form at the top of the page and expanded the header to show my big ugly face :)
The new design has the same look and feel as all StudioPress themes, so browsing the site and reading articles has the same feel as before. I may make some more tweaks over the coming weeks, however I am pretty happy with the way it looks at the moment.
What do you think of the new design?
Kevin