Every now and again I share some of the blogging tools I use and today I want to share about my latest WordPress theme. The theme is what sets up the look of a WordPress site. It generally sets the layout areas and their sizes as well as the fonts and colours. Some themes are fairly simple but others offer multiple page layouts, colour options and places to add extras (also called widget areas).
I’ve had a number of different themes on The Crafty Mummy over time but most recently I have used the Genesis Framework and Studiopress child themes. My latest is a child theme called Swank created by Pretty Darn Cute Design. I love her designs and have been tempted to change my theme before to one of hers. The thing that tipped me over this time was that Swank is mobile friendly so that my blog now looks great on mobile devices as well as desk top devices. As more people are reading websites on their phones and tablets, it makes sense to ensure that any website you want people to read is user-friendly on those devices.
The other feature of this theme that I liked was the front page. This allows me to showcase a number of posts on the front page from different categories. The Crafty Mummy covers a lot of different crafts and many visitors are particularly interested in crochet or sewing or quilting, and don’t want to see the other categories. So this new front page allows them to quickly find posts that they are interested in. The clean white interface makes the images “pop” and makes them the focus – another thing that I love.
When I started blogging I knew nothing about HTML or CSS or widgets or plugins or anything! But over time I have read a lot and taught myself heaps so that I was able to load this theme up and set it up with the help of the instructions fairly quickly. I have found that the Genesis framework makes this easy because when you change to a new child theme, you are not changing any of the basic blog elements in Genesis. When there is an update to WordPress, this too is easier with Genesis. I have found it well worth the money.
Disclosure: There are affiliate links in this post to products I use and love.
