As I mentioned in this post, I planned to make some changes on my blog, and I decided to start with a blog theme change first and purchased my recent favorite theme. Regular readers might have noticed that I flirted with the idea several times, and that I usually think twice if not more often before I make a change. However, at some point you have to reconsider, and then you get the idea that a change of scenery is necessary, that is where I have been for a very long time now. Yesterday I purchased the premium theme Beacon, I had the theme on my list since some time, I like it.

There were all kind of issues with the Twenty Ten theme I used earlier, but I can summarize and say it is now an outdated theme and doesn’t meet my requirements anymore. As I dislike to manage several blogs, and because I prefer to write on one single blog with all the subject I am interested in, I needed a theme where I could clearly separate my interests or subject, and that is what my new theme is doing very well. If you like, you can take a look at my new front page, and if you scroll down, you will notice a box for each of my main categories, it’s now sorted very well.

It’s not only that you can find the most recent posts of all the individual main categories on the front page, you can also open the tag or category pages directly as there are several links pointing to them, and at these pages the layout of the theme is very clean as well. You come here because of my photography related posts, because of the nature and animal posts, because of the technology posts or the gaming posts? Whatever you are looking for, now it’ll be easier to find it on my site. Over the following weeks, I might adjust the sorting, but for now it looks already pretty good.

If you know me already very well, you do know that I am never completely happy. I spotted some issues with the new theme too, and I wrote the theme developer in the support section to see if he is interested to take some of my ideas, or if certain things could be improved. There is a tiny chance that I will change the theme again, the chance is there, but it really depends on some things, but I won’t go into detail as the chance is bigger that I will stay with the new theme. I think you will always find some minor issues, and of course, a self-hosted blog would give you more flexibility.

I mentioned it in one of my previous posts, the theme change is just the first stage,  I will change the domain name of the blog as well in the future. Yes, I want to rebrand the blog, I want to make this change so hard. It’s said that a theme change together with a domain change is never a good idea, at least not if both is done together in the same time frame, because there is the risk that you mess up your Google rankings, it could cause issues. So, one after another, but I plan to make a domain redirection and re-branding sometime in two or three months, but sometimes in 2016.

For my regular readers, I hope you like the theme change too, in fact I hope it helps you to discover subjects that you like, and to make it easier to skip the categories that you don’t like. I do also hope the theme readability is better, I do think so as the content area is wider and the font bigger. As said, you can expect that I make some more adjustments, it could be messy at times, I hope you are not too annoyed if I experiment with the things here over the next weeks. I hope you enjoy the rest of the holidays together with your family and friends, have a nice time! At the end I suggest you to take a look at the tag page of my cat, and then click a couple of times on the “older posts” button, do you like to browse categories and tags with this theme? Let me know!