The Pen Is Mightier Than The Frontier? (Or, Another WordPress Theme Change)

As you might have noticed, things look very, very different around here. That’s because I found a new theme I liked — this one going by the name of “Pen” and amazingly, for all its raw power, complex code, and beauty it’s free (with some premium options, of course.)

To say the previous theme, Frontier, had grown stale would be an understatement. While I liked the look of it at first, the font size and overall presentation of content grew old quickly. It was, however, a natural evolution away from Graphene and I certainly don’t think Frontier is a bad theme at all — I just was in the mood for something different, and that desire was satiated the moment I found Pen.

This theme is insane. The look and feel of everything is just different — I almost can’t believe this is my site running as it is! The grid layout of articles provides a new twist on the content I produce, the size and proportions of everything really work well, the nature of page loading is pretty cool, and the fact that the theme includes several really well done color sets just adds to the usability; once I saw this dark purple color set I’m using currently that was it — I knew this was going to be perfect, at least for now.

I’m kind of surprised I only used Frontier for about a year and a half, but it seems to have run its course in usefulness to me. I wanted a bit of a “fresh start” for year 13 of this sites existence, and I can’t think anything more fresh than this overhaul!

As I said, this is a complex theme – options abound and it took quite a bit of tweaking to make things happen, but nothing too intense. It’s one of those “once you get used to how the theme presents its options and get the damn widgets set back up you’re good” kind of things. That’s the simplest way to describe it without making a whole damn tutorial on this theme, which I’m not about to, or I would consider “qualified” to do. Haha.

So, that’s that. Expect this to be the look of xadara.com going forward, at least for the foreseeable.

More to come, as always.