So, as I was told recently at Gamescom, my blog looks kinda “old” and not great but I also didn’t wanna change my theme all that much.
For what it’s worth, I don’t think the theme is bad… but I do agree that it’s a bit hard to find out what kind of blog it actually is, if that makes sense? So I made some changes.
For one, I didn’t change the theme because all the other themes available for free or on the personal plan on WordPress are bad. Like, you cannot change the colour preset unless you’re on the Business plan, meaning you’re kinda stuck with an ugly, unreadable green on one theme or this very bright yellow that burns itself into your readers’ retinae.
A lot of themes are also not capable of doing the things that Baskerville 2 can do… like having a featured image of sorts or utilizing a side bar where you can put handy features like a search bar, Google Translate or my various socials and Blaugust Awards. I wanna show them off to the world after all!
That said, I made some changes to the front page in particular. I had this header image I drew some ages ago with skele-hands but honestly it’s not on brand and doesn’t really mean much which is why I removed it. The top of my blog looks kind of empty as a result but it gives the whole thing a cleaner look overall.
There’s also a banner where people can gift me a subscription to the WordPress plan I’m using. I have no idea since when that’s a thing or if I turned that on or if it was WP. I’m not exactly a fan but I’m also not disliking the idea of people paying for a part of my bills, you know?
Beyond that, though, I reorganized the categories to now make use of sub-categories as well. This just means that you can hover over them for specific topics. The Lookout Post being where I talk about upcoming games, demos, but also my interviews. Indietail features both first impressions and reviews since they practically are the same thing anyway. The Stray Sheep is just literally everything else from Gaming to non-Gaming stuff.
But I also tossed out the “Random Post” thing because I saw that nobody ever clicks on that… or rather, it’s not in the “About” section. Might be a bad place to put it in but for the time being it’s in there together with the Blog Feed and DMCA page. If you click on the “About” thing, though, it will still bring you to the about section. Maybe I’ll add that as a separate thing below it for to avoid confusion.
In the Random Post tab’s place, I decided to add a “Magi’s Picks” section that just links to reviews of mine with games I recommended… aka good games.
Beyond that, I added a little “About” section on the front page in place of the post carousel because the latter looked terrible on mobile and I was missing a little something to say stuff about who I am and what the blog is. Currently, however, it’s still very much work in progress and super basic. I also don’t know what to do about the spacing issues there yet but I’ll work it out over time.
Last but not least, the feed below that will now only show reviews and interviews since those are the posts that I want folks to really pay attention to. If I write a bigger piece again on some other topic, I’ll just add it as an exception to the front page, though.
I might have been overthinking this but I really want folks to see what I’m passionate about, and in this case it’s mostly indie games, so that’s the focus… but everything else is still there and not hidden or anything.
This post was originally written by Dan Dicere from Indiecator.
If you see this article anywhere other than Indiecator.org then this article has been scraped. Please let me know about this via E-Mail.
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