If you want to make a designer cry, tell him or her to redesign their website. I’ve made three attempts since I did my last redesign two years ago, and every time, I’ve procrastinated by releasing another free WordPress theme instead. I find that designing for others is a lot easier than designing for myself. I think I’m a bad client.
A silver lining is that I got a lot of free WordPress themes out of it. My most recent one, Pulitzer, served as the starting point for my fourth attempt, which you’re likely looking at now. Like Pulitzer, it’s a straight shooter with small font sizes and simple layouts, partly inspired by the new design that Rich Tabor is rocking on his blog. After running a theme with massive headings for two years, it’s a nice change of pace with text sizes that max out at 18px1. I like this trend.
Another thing that the new design has in common with Pulitzer is the Block Bindings API introduced in WordPress 6.5. The redesign uses it to output the download and demo links as well as the metadata on the theme pages, and being able to do all that with a tiny amount of code and no custom blocks is huge. In a way, I’m glad I waited with building a block theme for the site until 6.5 was out.
Here are some other changes in the redesign:
- On the Themes page, I’ve separated my free WordPress themes between block themes and legacy (classic) themes, where the latter are presented in a simple chronological list.
- The blog archive has been updated with images and a category filtration. Does that mean I’ll blog more often? Probably not.
- When I do write something (statistically, it’ll either be about a new theme or a hiking trail diary), you can now subscribe to get an email about it.
- There’s a dark mode switcher in the header that defaults to your system settings. Necessary? Probably not, but it was fun to build.
Between work, Pulitzer, Vermeer and the redesign, I’ve been pretty busy with WordPress stuff these past two months. With hiking season soon starting, a trip to Austria in early June, and me and Rebecka moving into a house of our own in Vemdalen this August, I’m looking forward to less time spent in front of screens for a while.