Wordpress Theme Upgrade Complete – Lessons Learned

Okay, so that wasn’t so tough, although I was admittedly stressed out about taking it on.

I think that the majority of my anxiety came from the fact that my earlier theme (talian-10) was an older one. Notwithstanding the inherent flaws in that theme, it seems like I had to put a lot of customization into it to make it do things that it wasn’t necessarily designed to do. What had me so concerned with changing layouts was that I would have to put the same level of effort into customizations with the new theme as I did with the older one.

For this update, I went with something that was developed by the guys at
Unique Blog Design (UBD) that was made available for free from them a few weeks ago. I wish I had installed it sooner. Not only is it much easier to manage and customize than my original theme was, but it has a much smoother appearance with the generally accepted single right-column sidebar vs. the old left and right sidebar – 3 column layout that I had before.

I also made a conscious decision to cut down on the intrusiveness of advertisements on Jcyreus dot Com, which I am sure you can appreciate. Interestingly enough, I was able to do this without necessarily cutting down on the number of ads that I’m running. In fact, there are actually more ads with this layout, they are just presented in such a manner as to be less of a distraction and more “comfortably” integrated with the overall design of the blog.

Lessons Learned from this experience:

1. Don’t stress out over simple updates like theme changes. In the end, the little bit of extra work required to make it happen is worth it in the long run and your readers will appreciate the effort much more than the aggravation they might experience from the few days of kinks you need to work out after go-live.
2. Go with something that has been released recently or at least in the past 3-6 months by an experienced developer. Newer themes tend to better handle plugins, ad space and all of the other things that make your life easier so you can concentrate on that which really drives your blog’s success, which is CONTENT.
3. Find some friends to help you out with testing. Just as with writing a major paper or anything else you do that will ultimately serve to benefit parties other than yourself, you want to have someone else take a look at your work (objectively) and give you the feedback that your readers won’t give you before abandoning you due to their own frustration with the buggy-ness or crappy appearance of your site.

Good luck and please let me know if you find something on Jcyreus dot Com that doesn’t appear to be functioning properly. I’ll do my best to get it fixed ASAP.

Cheers!

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