A few days ago, the forecast for today was a hot sunny day, to properly mark the start of Summer. In turned out to be a windy overcast morning and a warm sunny evening with a light breeze, at least in my neck of the woods. Although today felt more like early Fall (my favourite time of the year) than Summer, I took the date to be a symbolic opportunity to change the markedly autumnal look of my blog de to the Maple Leaf theme shown left. It has served me well for the past months, but it was time to get something less seasonal.
I could have just replaced the falling leaves photo in the header by some photo of beach and sea or the like, but it wouldn’t match the foliage on the sides. Moreover, I wasn’t complete satisfied with the greyish green or the fonts used by Maple Leaf. Installing and trying out different WordPress themes is a breeze, the problem is choosing among the thousands of freely available themes.
After spending several hours during the past days (I’m insane, I know) surfing the web and trying out various ones, I settled for the Amazing Grace theme you’re looking at. Its green-based colour scheme establishes some continuation with the previous look of my blog, while definitely improving on the typography, with a large and readable font. Other things I like about Amazing Grace:
- the compact header, avoiding wasting valuable screen estate on small laptops and netbooks;
- the RSS feed icon and its placement in the header;
- the small colourful icons to provide visual cues on a post’s date, categories and comments;
- the horizontal layout of the categories in the header;
- the rotating photos in the header, which can help keep the blog in tune with seasons.
Unfortunately, no theme is perfect and there are also some drawbacks:
- the title of the blog doesn’t appear in the browser window and tabbed windows in Firefox;
- the date and author of a post are unnecessarily repeated;
- there is no icon for tags and they aren’t separated from the post;
- the second sidebar makes the main column narrower, leading to more scrolling.
Fortunately, Amazing Graze has a dedicated forum on the author’s website, so hopefully someone will be able to help me fix some of those minor snags. Overall, it’s a good looking, clean and readable theme.
Tags: themes