Having crashed and burned with Blogly, I’m not about to buy another theme. Probably never. Regardless, we all need a theme, a template for our pictures and writing. During this past week, I used two themes I’d worked with in the past: Yoko and Able. Both are clean and simple.

I quickly abandoned Yoko after encountering a problem with font sizes in the headers. I went back to Able which, while uninspiring and lacking pizzazz, is stable and more or less glitch free — at least as far as I can tell. It’s my fallback position. Able isn’t fancy, but it works.

Nonetheless, I wanted a theme with a bit more dash. As I’ve been visiting other bloggers, I’ve also been theme shopping. Looking at templates to see if they might suit me. And — I think — I found one. I hope.

So far, so good.

Twenty Fifteen is the most recent of WordPress’s annual default themes. Each year beginning in 2010, WordPress has created a “flagship” theme for the year. It becomes the default template for new blogs. Thus, if you are a new blogger, this will be the theme you will automatically use unless you pick something different.

When I visited Nancy Merrill today, I noticed she had changed themes, had switched to Twenty Fifteen. I liked the look of it. I asked her how she liked it. She said she did like it, though it had taken a bit of fiddling with the header image (really, in this case, a sidebar image) to make it look right.

Forewarned is forearmed. It turns out that the default proportions of many of my pictures fit neatly in the sidebar. The only problem was getting the text to show up clearly against the picture. And matching the background color.

Lucky me, I have the customization package which lets me change colors of fonts, backgrounds, headers, and links. I can also alter other template features, depending on the theme. Some are more amenable to customization than others and it is often impossible to know exactly what you can do with a theme until you test drive it. The package also gives me a domain and more storage space in WordPress’s cloud.

I have come to appreciate being able to customize themes. Fonts and colors make a huge difference. Any theme you use becomes unique. And I have to admit, it’s fun playing with graphics. I enjoy messing around with fonts and backgrounds.

This theme is designed differently than anything I’ve tried before. It doesn’t allow a standard header picture, which is a big change for me. It does let you put a picture in the left sidebar under the text. Like wallpaper. I can change it as often as I want, but I’m trying to lessen the amount of maintenance my site needs. I want to build a little library of sidebar pictures I can change with the seasons, holidays, or special occasions. Or my mood.

So far so good. I haven’t bumped into any glitches. Of course, I’ve only had it up for a day, but it is a well-supported theme. Maybe WordPress’s best-supported theme, being it is the default for 2015. I’m hoping it’s solid.

I’ve learned a lot about what I want in a theme in recent months. The big one, which I never considered in the past, is support. Ironically, there’s better support for popular free themes than for expensive purchased ones. I think that could be considered ironic. Sort of.

Categories: #Blogging

Tags: #Blogging, Design, template, themes, WordPress