Yes, this is the same blog site and looks a bit different but I hope the change is a positive one. I’ve been long aware that my blog has been in a state of disrepair and the readability has gone downhill. Due to commitments at work and home, I’ve not been getting the chance to do anything about it. Thinking that it will never happen this way, yesterday, I finally started on it. It’s by no means complete yet but this will do for now.

My first priority was to get the layout and text to fit into the new theme. If you’ve done this before, you’ll know that it’s quite lucky if things fit in nicely first time with a new one. There was quite a bit of work I had to do there to get it going. As it’s a purely theme specific thing, I won’t into too much detail but even things like header and tagline didn’t work initially. If you caught my blog at that time, it might have been a bad experience so my apologies for that. Anyway, once I got through the initial configuration, I just tried to make it a bit similar to the format before, confirm that all content is displaying correctly and basic functionality like search and links etc. are working as expected. As I also had all possible backups taken, I took this opportunity to upgrade to WordPress 4.0 as well.

The new theme has quite a few options so I might experiment with them in the future (tastefully) but yesterday, was just about improving readability and getting the capabilities to improve user experience in the future. Talking about user experience, one other goal was to improve response times for the blog. I was quite surprised with the improvement as I wasn’t expecting that much. There is about 300 – 400% improvement when it comes to loading the same pages. I know because I have a record of the history and also checked just before the changes. I did the test before the upgrade to WordPress 4.0 so the improvement is purely down to the new theme so if you’re suffering from it too, the theme could be one of the things to review first.

I’ll take a breather and let the blog settle for now. Hopefully the experience is better now and I will try to make it a bit more interesting if I get some more time.