Emergency Theme Switch


My mind has been locked up all week – yet again. I have a great idea for a blog post I want to write. I started the post, typed out the title, uploaded a picture, saved the draft, and I’ve been stuck ever since! Work was extremely difficult this week and I haven’t been feeling 100% anyway. I’ll get to that blog post eventually I guess.

My grand plans for today were to clean my fish tanks and work on more keyword research. I woke up this morning with my eczema flaring up worse than it ever has before. Tanks were out of the question! Then I checked my email and saw something I wanted to post on one of my sites. I drafted up the blog entry and went to the site to get a link. Wait… what happened to the site?!?! It didn’t look ANYTHING like it was supposed to!! That’s when I remembered the theme had updated yesterday. Crap. Theme updates aren’t supposed to break things like this! The developers basically rolled out a completely new theme and all settings had vanished. Ugh, NOT GOOD.

If that news wasn’t bad enough – I also used that theme on THIS site as well as the site I’m trying to get to go viral. ARGH!!! This theme looked PERFECT on that site. 🙁

My first task was to attempt to put the site back to the way it was. This worked in theory only. Apparently a plugin was preventing me from updating any settings, so I disabled ALL the plugins. I got my header image uploaded to the theme and… what, no header image on the page? That’s when I came over to this blog and started playing around with the updated theme a little more. One of the features I was using on the viral contender was a slideshow of recent posts. I activated the slideshow on this blog just to test it out and… what, no slideshow on the page? WTF developers? How do you screw up a theme THAT BAD?! That’s when I decided I was done with the theme. This roll-out has been at least 2 years in the works and is an absolute failure. Too bad – it used to be a great theme to work with.

Off on my quest to find a new theme I could work with! First I researched slideshow options. I have some possible solutions, but for now I’m leaving the slideshow off the page. There are plugins that might be able to accomplish what I want and the new theme itself has a built in slider option. I found a very highly rated theme that looked promising, so I installed it here to play with it in a live environment. Uh… tolerable at first. Too much WHITE and the header logo area was just too small. Eh, it was ok, but not quite what I wanted. This theme has quite the extensive help page though, so I poked around their for a while. As soon as I found out how to change the background and text colors, as well as the header image – I was sold! Installed it on the viral contender and went to work. 🙂

The new theme is very modern and clean looking. It has a few features that I don’t currently have activated. One feature in particular I plan to activate soon. I just need to get a couple new pages set up first to use as featured content. These are ideas I already had in the works and now I HAVE to get them published so I can make the site look the way I want it to.

Funny how I ended up using the viral contender to practice custom CSS changes on instead of this one. Once I got that site looking a bit more professional, I came back to this site and did the same. This new theme has so many possibilities and the developers seem to be interested in making it BETTER over time. Now THAT is something I can work with. 🙂