New Year, New Look?

by Naithin · January 22, 2022

Well, I didn’t start out the day with the plan to overhaul the theme, look and feel of Time to Loot. But here we are. New theme, look and feel. The trigger for change, in this case, wasn’t one of dissatisfaction with the previous look. Rather after Mailvaltar noted the comment ‘Reply’ function didn’t work and confirmed this through testing, it felt about time to do something about it.

Not least because Pete had observed the same behaviour in the past, but he put it down to user error at the time. I had an inkling that might not be the case after it happened again but I could never test it myself. For whatever reason, I cannot use my on-page comment form to reply. It doesn’t like some mix of my local and WordPress global accounts and errors out if I try. Instead, I reply to comments via the WordPress notifications area and that works fine — replies and all.

Did changing the theme fix it? I dunno!

But I can at least say I do like the new look. Particularly after Krikket helped me tone done some of my initial colour theming ideas, e.g., making the top-right banner background colour be a flaming orange. (It looked OK for site accents and links, which also drew from that colour… But… It was definitely a bit… um, eye-catching.)

For posterity’s sake, the old look was something like this:

The ‘Extra‘ theme, which I wrangled with a bit to bring more in line with a blog aesthetic rather than a magazine — which is closer to its intended purpose.

Unfortunately though, I couldn’t tell you when I put that theme live! For whatever reason, it looks like I didn’t do a post for this change.

I can tell you I moved away from the antiquated Genesis Framework in July 2019. And it wasn’t long after that I gave Elementor a try. I feel like I ran that setup quite a while before shifting gears from Elementor to Divi and giving Extra a shot, maybe late into 2020.

If that’s the case, Extra has been serving me well (for the most part) for a fair while now!

I had no complaints (beyond the comment-reply issues, which may or may not even have been caused by it) but now that I’ve changed… I can’t deny I like the look of this one a little better.

I’m using the Heuman Pro theme now — although there is a free version available simply called Heuman Free if you like the look of this and want to have a little play around with it yourself. :)