Finding a good theme for a Wordpress blog is hard
I’ve been looking around for a decent theme for the whole time I’ve had this WordPress blog. I’m experiencing a strong case of analysis paralysis, there are so many themes available for WordPress but also there’s a huge hole in the themes available. Most theme authors/creators market their themes as being very design heavy and photo heavy, take a look at the current popular themes on WordPress:
Most blogs with long form text or just text as their primary form of writing are not considered in these themes. The official WordPress themes are decent, I’m using a Automattic created theme at the time of writing this called “Blank Canvas”. I edited a few things like the header to make the logo size smaller:
A few years ago, when I was working on the Leaf theme, I ran into this weird issue where I was working between the theme and trying to make it as simple as possible but I lacked the design sense to make it appear as nice as I wanted to.
I’m writing this post so that I can distract myself from starting yet another theme effort to make my ideal blog theme.
The things I’d love to have in a blog that would just be a perfect theme:
- Prioritizes long form text, posts lacking photos still look good.
- Homepage displays blog posts as the primary content, no big images or homepage specific content.
- Top header is minimal and present on all pages but is not imposing.
- Has legible typography, uses the best readability styling on mobile, desktop, dark mode or light mode.
- Has a nav item that shows selected or all pages.
- Footer is minimal, post footer can have related posts.
- Specific content types are styled and covered, e.g. blockquotes have proper styling, code snippets have fixed font.
- Is free and open to contributions.
This idealistic list can be used to create a fairly decent theme in my opinion. After typing this out, I am thinking it might just be best I start working on one. So much for resisting the urge 🤣.
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