I’ve been immersing myself in WordPress for days now. I finally found a template I like – one of those paid ones that has a free version. It’s really solid and has a number of different templates within the template. Using the free version on my personal blog, I got to really dig into those weeds and I liked what I found. 

I’ve always been a minimalist, in design and in the back end so I’ve always preferred my clients not install many WP plugins or actually modify WordPress but this one template is well done and includes a number of widgets/plugins that I like. I didn’t have to get much additional to make the site do what I wanted. It comes with a really decent responsive bit and ways to edit in admin that don’t impact the page source CSS styling much if any. Setting up a child theme was a snap with the provided files and I feel really satisfied with the end result.

I always edit CSS on any site – display is highly important to me and too often editing formatting in a theme just dumps the CSS into the header of site, a poor way to format a website. Of course a child theme really helps avoid such issues but I’m lazy and don’t want to have to create a child theme when I don’t feel good about the longevity of the template to start with.

This one includes 4 menus, several great little plugins, elementor editor (which I haven’t bothered with but folks may really like), live, instantaneous preview which becomes a teaching tool, and a lot of other features. Okay, it’s OceanWP in case you have to know! With a paid version you get a lot more choices of template/layout and some other extensions but I’m fine with just the freebie for now – you do get support with the paid version but I definitely have plans to buy a multi-site package in the future.

The blog you are presently reading is using a really old template which is missing a lot of functionality due to it’s age but the css is solid and I altered it for responsiveness. But no point in a child theme as it’s been dropped long ago by the creators. Since I wanted the blog incorporated as a portion of my whole website, this works well for me. I basically just added my site style sheet to the theme stylesheet and made few edits. It’s all I want or need.

But if you are using WordPress for your entire website, you’ll probably want more.  If you want me to install or work on WordPress, you will probably see it in action on your website. It’s really that adaptable – for virtually all websites.