New Theme for DaedTech
As you may have noticed, if you’re not reading this via RSS, I’ve changed the look and feel of the site a bit. I wanted to keep the overall theme of the site while getting a little more modern with the UX, and this is the result. The content portion doesn’t expand to the full width of your screen on higher resolution, things are a little more tiled, and the blog home no longer displays all text, pictures, etc.
I accomplished this by installing the catch box theme and then modifying the CSS to get it to look mostly similar to daedtech as it existed before. I also made modifications to some of the theme’s PHP pages. I looked at a pretty good cross-section of posts and pages to make sure I ironed out all of the kinks, but no doubt some of you will find ones I missed in the first 45 minutes the theme is live, so please feel free to let me know if anything looks weird or wrong to you, either via email or comments.
My hope is that the theme choice and modifications help to improve the site’s performance. I’m also planning to make some additional modifications along those lines to speed things up in the next few weeks as well, time allowing.
Cheers!
Looks great!
Thanks! It always seems like a fine line to walk between improving and not getting too far from what people are used to. I’m glad I seem to be walking it at least somewhat.
Looks good. I don’t remember exactly what it used to be like, but in my opinion the content area is a bit too narrow.. it only uses about 1/4 of my screen at 1920.
That was one of the big changes — the narrowing of the blog itself. I think I need to look for a happy medium between sprawling across a giant, widescreen monitor and not spreading out enough. Thanks for the feedback — I’ll see if I can get my hands on a monitor like yours and tinker a bit.
I just noticed a problem with the menus. The Services/Portfolio/Additional Info main menus are clickable, but take you to a blank page. Only the submenus have content. I haven’t tested this, but I suspect that it would also be a usability issue for mobile devices where there are no mouse over event to bring up the menu.
That’s a good point, and I think it’s a limitation of WordPress that I need to address at some point. I actually have had it languishing in my DaedTech trello board for a while — I think I’m going to have to do some tinkering with the theme PHP. But anyway, I checked on my phone (Android 4) and the menu behavior brings up this radio button interface deal. I’ll have to see if WordPress offers some kind of easy mobile support that provides a better user experience than that.