In my previous post “My Website Theme” I discussed talking about three different themes I chose from and I chose “Astra.” At the time Astra seemed beneficial for my website, but as I began trying to customize my website and realized that it was not for me. I was having trouble customizing my website the way I desired, adjusting certain elements seemed impossible to me, and my experience customizing my website with the Astra theme was difficult for me to use. So, I decided to try and customize it with a different theme: Ocean WP. Ocean WP seemed a lot better than Astra for me in terms of how easy it was to design my website the way that I loved it. I chose the “store” template with Ocean WP, but I came up with more obstacles. My first obstacle with Ocean WP was that it had features of a shop that I just did not have yet. The Goofy Gremlin is a shop that is coming soon, but it is not here yet, so the shopping elements have not benefited me yet. Another obstacle was the interface view of my website was not perfect on the mobile view, desktop view, and tablet view. No matter what I tried to change in the settings I could not get the interfaces to match each view. So, I made one last theme change to my website. I found the Hanuman theme by WPKoi on WordPress. So far, customizing my website with the Hanuman theme has been extremely easy, straightforward, and excellent. The theme has all the settings to design my website as I needed. Hanuman theme on my website can be designed as both a blog and a shop. It had no reviews which is a risk I had to take, but I have found this theme to be a gamechanger for designing my website.
One thing that the Hanuman theme did not have was personal widgets that came with the theme, so I did not use any widgets on my website. I did not feel I had the need to add any special widgets because my website is small with only a few posts, but as my website grows to become the broader Goofy Gremlin merch brand and Blog then I will add necessary widgets to increase the functionality of my website for my blog. I added one search widget to the menu which allows visitors to my blog and merch website to find content they are looking for in the search icon instead of looking through the entire navigation menu. This search icon feature that I added will be more beneficial when there is more content on my website, especially when my shop will be up and running with merchandise.
Other various things I added and customized to my Goofy Gremlin website is I added designed the website to have a purple, black, white color scheme to match my Goofy Gremlin brand colors. Another element I changed within my website is I made the text to my content white instead of black for better visual contrast to the purplish galaxy in the background as the background image. I set the background image to fit the webpage with no repeat. Another thing I added to my website was I used CSS to formulate my body heading to be aligned in the center and formulated the size of my header font to 20px. This was a feature I could not do on a regular WordPress theme customization. Many trial and errors occurred with the customization of my website constantly trying different buttons to see what the change would do on my website, trying different color schemes, adjusting different aspects of my website to fit the webpage appropriately, and making sure that the interface looks similar to each other between desktop view, tablet view, and mobile view. My website will continue to be updated for better visualization between all devices.
The biggest obstacle in my entire webpage design was finding the right theme to fit my needs, as I mentioned previously. Astra could had been a blog, but it did not fit the needs I required to design my website – Hanuman has been much easier for me to put together my website. Ocean WP was better but it had too many elements pertaining to an ecommerce shop which The Goofy Gremlin currently is not in that step of the process yet, but Hanuman is perfect because it allows me to easily design my website as a blog and as a shop for when my Goofy Gremlin shop opens online to visitors with merchandise to present. Astra and Ocean WP, which are popular themes used around the world, was great to the world but was not what I needed. Sometimes popular things are not what we need to succeed – Sometimes it is the simple things, the things less chosen in life that benefit our needs like the Hanuman theme did for me to design my website.
Another great feature with WordPress Customization is the ability to schedule your updated web designs rather than publishing them immediately. A couple of reasons it may be beneficial to schedule your updated designs is if you have made a post to your customers that a new website structure will be coming soon and you want to give them a heads-up on the date then this feature will be great to use. Another feature is if you are at work or in school and you have a deadline to publish your design by a certain due date you can have it set on a certain day to be published so that you do not forget. These are just a couple reasons why using the scheduling tool on the WordPress customizer may be beneficial for you!
If you have read this far and liked my post about the process with me customizing my website then make sure to give this post a like, share it, and comment down below which meme gives your life the most meme-ing! And do not forget to make someone else’s life more meme-ingful by sharing that special meme that makes your life meme-ingful to them too!
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