My Site’s Getting A New Look

Time For A New Face

For the last few months, I’ve been looking for a new theme for my site. The theme I was using has served me well since 2007 but it was starting to look tired to me. Plus, I wanted to do something that signaled my rededication to the site. What better way than to give it a facelift I thought.

I Had Specific Needs For The Theme

After spending who knows how many hours in the last year looking at free and premium themes, I came to a couple of conclusions.

1. Many themes were not meant to be tinkered with by non-programmers.
2. Paying for a theme doesn’t guarantee it will work better than a free theme.

I found all kinds of beautiful themes that were very unfriendly to even a WordPress savvy user. If you didn’t like the theme as it was, good luck trying to change it through the dashboard. Stuff just wouldn’t display right or would look outright awful if you tried to mess with it.

One example that comes to mind are the themes that claim to be widget-friendly but have a majority of their elements hardcoded into them. In other words, if you inserted one widget, you had to basically rebuild the entire theme. Yes, I understand from a programming standpoint that there has to be a switch that says to WordPress “when I use a widget you need to shut off the hardcoded elements”. That doesn’t make it any less frustrating because often the widget version of a feature just doesn’t look or work as well as the hardcoded feature.

Then I Found Flexibility2

In another of my searches for themes I happened on the Flexibility2 theme by Ryan Graberstein of Advantus Media. The theme was free to try and looked awesome so I thought I’d give it a whirl. The more I got into the theme, the more impressed I was with it.

I’ve tried out themes before that allowed a high degree of customization. The problem with them usually was that there were too many choices. Your average blog publisher only wants to change so many things themselves. Otherwise, they’d rather hire a web designer. Most bloggers just don’t want to micro-design their blogs.

I learned quickly that the Flexibility2 theme was exactly what I was looking for. It included a back end that allowed me to turn on or off features I wanted without completely screwing up the theme. I could easily choose a header, use one of my own or replace the title and tag with my own logo if I wanted to. There were a number of pre-set sidebar configurations and tons of stuff that can be tweaked by anybody with even rudimentary WordPress skills.

I was hooked.

Over the next month, I will be making changes to my site as I implement new programs and I am completely confident that Flexibility2 will hang right with me no matter what I need to do. Plus, Ryan’s videos and personal support are second to none.

Check Out The Flexibility2 Theme Today!

PS-While you’re on his site, make sure you get a look at his newest theme-FlexSqueeze. FlexSqueeze allows you to set up professional landing pages within your WordPress site. Plus, FlexSqueeze is a painless upgrade from the Flexibility2 theme when you’re ready to get serious about making great landing pages in a snap.