Since switching over to WordPress many years ago we have never taken the effort to update the layout and look of the website. During the original switch, we made the conscious effort to preserve the look of the website. You can also blame it on laziness, a stubbornness against customising a WordPress theme and the past layout serving our needs perfectly well. However, in the last seven years the internet and mobile phones have progressed at an incredible rate, which has resulted in our website lacking in a few key features. Namely, responsiveness. To get round this problem there a few WordPress plugins that exist that allow the website to serve both mobile and PC platforms with ease. These plugins come at a cost and add unseen overhead to the data that the server handles and this route has resulted in us have quite a high number of plugins installed. Not the best practice.
We must admit that a visual update was not entirely planned, but we manically clicked a few buttons and eventually broke something. This caused us to decide to look into the website as a whole and identify where we could make improvements. What is it with the dark winter nights and fiddling with things? A few key areas were identified and we set to work butchering the latest WordPress Theme to meet our demands. All this has resulted in the following improvements:
- A new front page,
- A dynamic menu that you cannot escape,
- A reduction in the plugin count by 1/3, hopefully speeding the site up,
- Responsiveness to mobile/desktop browsing,
- Full width pages being applied to the site as a whole,
- Some flashy design gimmicks we quite like – hello parallax scroll!
- Some other things we may not be remembering right now.
Hopefully you find the new look satisfying, best get back to some exploring now! Next up, the Maginot Line.
