Fooling Around with WordPress Themes

Since I started blogging on WordPress, I have taken full advantage of the various themes they have on offer. I started off with Thirteen – a lovely green theme, before moving on to the very popular Misty Look and Pressrow themes.

Three themes in three years! But, change is good, right. And, I love how differently my blog can be perceived when the theme changes.

Of late, I have been covetously eyeballing two very different themes on various blogs – Spring Loaded and Vigilance.

Spring Loaded reminds me of my first Thirteen theme – only with a playful edge. Unfortunately, when I previewed the theme with my blog, I realized that all the widgets on the right column did not appear so good. The green frames that were supposed to encase the widgets correctly were either too big or too small. Even more surprisingly, the standard WordPress widgets for tags, archives, and so on did not display properly. After fiddling around with the settings (to no avail), I just gave up the effort and moved on to Vigilance.

I love the Vigilance theme. It looks beautiful in a very unfrivolous way. Unfortunately, one glitch spoiled it for me. The custom header options in Vigilance do not allow me to put my blog title over or below my header image. The title comes bang on the image, and completely spoils the look. Although, I can change the font colors, nothing I did seemed to lessen the effect. Vigilance does offer me an option to remove my blog title completely. This is a nice option because it means that I can create my own header image with my blog title, something I will definitely do some day.

However, for now, it is back to the Pressrow by Chris Pearson theme. I think it will live on as my theme of choice for a lot longer than I planned to. At first, I thought Pressrow was pretty bland, but as days go by, I am just more and more impressed by it’s simplicity and ease. I have never had any problems with widgets, they all display pretty decently. I love its navigation. I love how all my pages are displayed so boldly right at the top of the main page. And yes, I also love that I have a separate blog title and custom header image.

After all this playing around, I did eventually retain one change I made. I have included a Rating button at the bottom of my blog posts (you can see it when you click on the blog title, or the Comments button). So, if you don’t want to comment, you can still rate the blog post.

Looking forward to seeing some ratings on my blogs, starting from this one 🙂