Almost three years ago, on July 18, 2011, I was finally launching this website after two months spent meticulously editing and customising the CSS of a very old WordPress theme — “Futurosity Magazine” — of which I was very fond nonetheless. Two months is a long time but: a) I wasn’t working on this 24/7, and b) I knew very little CSS, so there was a lot of learning by trial and error.
From July 2011 up to now, the visuals of the site have changed little. There have been many refinements over time (I updated my logo, changed the contents of a few sections on the main page, slightly altered the column width in the site’s grid system, changed webfonts and improved the overall legibility, and many other little things) but nothing really drastic.
A few days ago I was trying to make yet another small refinement without immediate success. So, after taking a long, critical look at what had become the website’s stylesheet after three years of tweaking, I just got annoyed and expressed my frustration to my wife. She suggested what I was already thinking about: start anew with a better, more up-to-date theme, something that already integrates features I’d like to add presently or in the future.
The search wasn’t long, as I had already bookmarked a possible list of alternatives. The final choice has been the High Art theme by Allan Cole at Theme Supply Co. I have made a few customisations, but very small, very light ones (mainly I retained the previous typography based on Charter and Clear Sans Screen). The simple truth is that this theme, for me, works pretty well out of the box.
I generally despise website redesigns for redesign’s sake. I must say this change doesn’t come because I got tired of the old visuals, but because I was tired of having to open an editor and alter the CSS for every little detail I wanted to change, add, hide, move. The stylesheet was becoming a mess and I was starting to waste too much time on it.
What I’ve tried to achieve with this new look is a general visual simplicity, focussing on the readability of single posts (now the article body area is at least 100px wider), and trying to reduce the visual clutter a bit.
I apologise for taking the site down for 48 hours or so. There were elements I needed to place differently, and experiments with features and content organisation I wanted to carry out privately before bringing the site back online. Now things should work, but I’m still checking old articles to see if the old formatting plays nice with the new theme, especially for things like numbered and bulleted lists, footnotes, and image sizes. So if you see the RSS feed of Morrick.me updating in a seemingly random way, it’s because I’m refreshing past articles. Thanks for your patience and I hope you like the new look.