If you’ve been to this site at all in the past few months you certainly will recall the rather beautiful, yet very “heavy” theme I had switched to, known as “Pen” and will certainly notice that, for now, I’ve switched back to the older theme I had been using: Frontier.
This isn’t because I don’t like Pen. Far from it, I absolutely love it, but it’s so damned excessive! Really, as beautiful as it is, does it really need to be a 5-10 second load? Does a website *ever* need a loading screen? Seriously, it was overkill.
I knew it was when I selected it, but I wanted something fresh.. and it was able to be switched to a dark purple scheme that I really liked. Okay, sure, if I got off my lazy butt and finally bothered to learn CSS and the like I could probably write a theme that would both be minimal and have the color scheme I like, but I’m a lazy man with too many projects going on already, so, no dice there.
That’s a shame, really, as I do think Pen is an amazing theme, but I have to be honest with myself: when a friend mentions on twitter that she enjoyed reading an article “once the page loaded” that’s a subtle but obvious clue that the average user may well not enjoy that wait time. It’s a statistic I already knew – if pages don’t load within a few seconds at most people will likely click away – but one I felt wouldn’t matter given the niche target audience of my blog anyway.
It would seem my opinion changed after reading that comment and while I didn’t notice any major changes to my sites hit rates or user retention, in the end I’d still rather have something more straightforward than not, so for now, we’re back to the old theme. I’ll probably “spice it up” a bit, maybe with a new background image, and make some adjustments (and fix the old widget layout as that got destroyed during the change over) but beyond that, until I find a theme that is compact, formatted the right way and otherwise blows me away with its quality, it’s going to be a bit more of the “same old same old” around here.
More to come, as always.