Goodbye Theme of Yester-week…
I am a lover of visually creative endeavors, and I would even add making graphs to that list mind you. I was utterly excited to create my blog banner this week; yes, sadly that is the only creative time I get these days. So, after watching the course videos for the week and hunting through the readings to get some know-how, I felt this fictitious wind push me forward. I was ready; the universe has my back and so I went!
I was quite happy with the theme I had selected for this blog thus far and yet I knew that it needed some spicing up. Some sprucing up. Some eye-catching pictures and even sound to hook readers in just at first glance.
And then it happened. I began to search for how to add an image to the header and low and behold, my esteemed theme only allowed for a teeny tiny 60 x 60 pixels image. For what was ahead of me, this WordPress theme was – how shall I say it? NOT GOOD. It did not allow for a customized banner and so it was quickly ixnayed and thus began my somersault onto the battlefield of banners.
… There’s a New Theme in Town!
The process of capturing the next banner off the battlefield was an all-consuming and time-consuming circuitous escapade with a side of frustration and fun!
Two selections in and they were gone! My widgets: they were disrespectfully lost in cyberspace. I selected the original theme, and they came back so I decided that they weren’t lost but I needed to find a theme that allowed them to miraculously emerge from their hiding place.
One by one, after filtering for “custom header,” I looked everywhere with my bestie, the theme preview button. Some themes I adored, while some I abhorred. Frankly, there was something appreciated about quite a few of them but none was the whole package. Merging them together would have been perfect, even better would be creating my own theme, but the new blogger in me allowed that idea to gently escape my thoughts.
So, I settled. In this newly found relationship with WordPress themes, I settled. As they say, the devil you know may be simpler to work with than the angel you do not yet know; the angel being creating my own. So, what’s a lady to do? Settle.
And just like that, there was a new theme in town called Accelerate! Even though it did not truncate the posts, which is something I prefer, it promised to randomly swap out the blog banners if I uploaded more than one. I thought this could give the blog a fresh look ever so often but alas, it is not an automatic feature.
And then came Om!
Om Saves the Day!
My head was spinning a bit.
The battlefield of banners was no joke.
I took a break. A breathwork Om-break to calm my nerves.
After all, settling was, well, hard!
Onward to Victory, sort of
Refreshed after Om, I begun to play around with Accelerate as it had more options than that OTHER theme I had selected in the distant past. Once I figured out what things meant, I boldly swapped out the main color to a happy green.
Then, I stepped into the resources provided for the week to find images. Images that I could freely do whatever I wanted with.
I wanted images that invoked the name and tagline of the blog.
This time around, I chose NOT to use any of my own just to see.
Musings and reveries land on the blog through my somersaults; I looked for images that spoke reflections, daydreams, and a literal somersault in action. Images of the vast starry sky or swimming in the ocean gave me a sense of being lost in deep thought and dreaminess with a dandelion bringing in some wishful thinking.
A bit of expansiveness, a bit of whimsy, a bit of fright.
I used Unsplash to find the pictures and was pleasantly surprised that finding free high-quality images was very easy.
Then it was on to win the battle of creating the banner.
I used Canva for that; a force of habit. I included attributes to the source of the images, with links and all, but when transferred into the blog banner all was lost. Once the banner was created in Canva, I passed it through Pixlr to resize the graphic to 1100 x 300 pixels; in hindsight, I should have done this process in reverse as the letters now look blurry on the banner. Weren’t we warned of this in all the resources provided? Hmmm…
With the promise of changing the header image, I created the 3 banners below.
I have chosen Banner#3 to show for now. I centered it on the page and placed it between the site title and the rest of the blog. Now since the blog title and tagline were on the header image, the “header logo only” is placed up top; sadly the embedded hyperlinks on the images do not work. Maybe one day I will find a way through HTML code?
To add more pizazz – for me, that is – I added a menu to the top of the page with categories and a Home link. The Home link is so that if a reader ever got lost in blog-land, they could always find their way home.
Feeling bold, I even added a picture of a pond I took from a train as the site identity. This certainly helped me easily find my blog amongst all the open tabs in my browser.
Then, the Redeemer Came!
Then I found it!
I digressed from the main assignment a tad. My curiosity got the better of me.
It was hidden in the theme’s features, and it was called the Responsive Menu.
I hadn’t the faintest idea what it meant so I decided to start researching and realized, this is how to make the blog accessible to those with disabilities. I went into the list of WordPress plug-ins and hit ACTIVATE for this plug-in. I felt redeemed. Maybe there was a silver lining to settling in the middle of the battle. Pride had arrived!
I went back to “View Site”, and nothing had changed. I was quite perplexed. Like the widgets I lost on the battlefield earlier, the Responsive Menu was a no-show.
I scanned every corner of the page and then I found it. An outline of a person inside a blue circle; it was there, hidden in plain sight!
I proceeded to change the settings within this menu and got a glimpse into what others may see. I turned off colors, increased font size, and turned on the underline feature for hyperlinks so that they would stand out. And the Google Site Reader extension? It worked. It read the blog aloud like a charm even with the title hidden. Yes, I know. The robotic voice could use some finesse, but it was impressive.
I feel redeemed, somewhat victorious with this new theme in town.
The battle of the banners has been mostly won.