At Last, A Redesign For Coffee With Allan

Oh dear, what Have I done!

Coming up to my ten year anniversary with Coffee With Allan and I’d let the site get a bit old and tatty, so it was time for a redesign and a good think!

After a lot of consideration, and messing around, I’ve gone with the Genesis platform from Studiopress, using the Beautiful Pro theme.

I’d had the Dynamik Builder on the site, but I had only ever scratched at the surface as far as customizing the site was concerned, so I have retired that for the time being.

It will be back – I have installed it on a local server while I play with it.

In the meantime I have been playing with Beautiful Pro for a little while, and I must say that I like the simplicity of the layout. I still have a bit of tidying up to do with fonts, colors and layouts.

If you find a link not working or some other problem, I would appreciate a shout out! Much easier to fix if I find it sooner rather than later, and much less embarrassing.

What’s your favorite theme for WordPress? There are a stack of them out there, and a lot of the free ones are excellent too.

Over time I think that some designers have tended to forget the simplicity of the platform to use (yes, yes Irene I do realize that there is a whole lot of coding there, and it all takes work, but I’m talking about simplicity for the end user..).

You see, I’m a writer, and a photographer.

I can build a wordpress site, but by the time I get through the customizing of the theme and getting the thing just the way I want it, I’ve spent hours and days, sometimes weeks, not doing more productive stuff.

Which brings me back to the simplicity angle – the reason that WP became so popular to start with is that it was simple for the end user to adapt, without having to spend that time, or a fortune hiring someone to fix it for them!

What do you think? I’d love to hear your thoughts on this!