Changing blog themes may have unintentional consequences

August 22, 2010 by John Dilbeck · 3 Comments
Filed under: Blogging, WordPress 

A couple of days ago, I decided that I wanted my blog themes to be simpler and cleaner, so I switched from the theme I was using on two of my blogs to the one I’m now using on this one and on John Dilbeck And Friends. Currently, I’m using the Revolution Code Blue theme by Brian Gardner. If you’re interested, there’s a link in the footer to the theme.

I decided that I wanted the content in a large left column and the widgets in the right column. Since I put a lot of stuff in the right column (recent posts, recent comments, top commentator, links to affiliate sites, links to other blogs, several RSS feeds, and a few more things), I decided to have two right columns.

I still haven’t decided if I like how it’s set-up yet, or not. I may be changing things in the next few days.

Installing and activating the theme was easy, but then I had to spend a couple of hours adjusting the widgets to where I wanted them and modifying a few of them.

I think blogs are inherently difficult to navigate, so I wanted to make sure I had easy-to-find links to the pages, recent posts, and recent comments. That took only a few moments to set up.

Then, I left to do other things that really needed doing, like resting and taking naps.

In the interim, I was talking to a friend on Facebook about his new blog and how I thought it was hard to navigate. The only way to find other posts was to go to the home page and scroll down.

I wrote and suggested that he add at least the recent posts and comments, especially if he wanted to foster conversations on what he wrote via comments. I also suggested that he have “breadcrumbs” at the top and bottom of his posts that would point to previous and next posts.

Today, I came back and looked at both blogs where I’d changed the theme and noticed that they no longer had the breadcrumb navigation links. That’s when I realized that they were part of the coding of the previous theme I’d been using and it wasn’t included in this one.

So, I did some digging on another blog that still uses the previous theme and found the code to add the breadcrumbs to this and the other blog.

When I did it, it looked horrible. There was overlapping between the navigation links and the Title of the blog post. So, I had to spend some time modifying the CSS code so everything would look okay.

While I was at it, I decided to put the Adsense ads back at the top and bottom of each post. I’ll give it a month or so and see how it produces. If it’s profitable on these blogs, I’ll leave them. If not, poof, they’ll be deleted.

So, while it took only a few minutes to change the theme, it has taken five or six hours of tweaking and adjusting to get it to what I want, and I’ve only seen them in Safari on Macs, so far.

I had some good reasons for changing the themes, but I really didn’t expect it to take this much work to get them back to where I wanted them.

Just as I was about to call it completed for now, I noticed that the new theme was showing all the pages on this blog in a horizontal navigation bar right below the header, and then obscuring most of them. I didn’t like how that looked and I didn’t like that it showed some of the pages that weren’t the most important right below the header.

So, I took a few minutes and removed the code that automatically generated the list of pages and replaced it with hard links to what I consider to be the most important pages that should be shown in that part of the navigation menu. It was easy to do, but I almost didn’t see it.

I wonder what else I haven’t noticed, yet.

Have you had any interesting experiences when changing the theme of your blog(s)? Are you using free or premium themes? Do you have any advice to offer your fellow bloggers?

Act on your dream!

JD

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