Hi. I see you're new here. That's cool. To find out what this site is about, please read this page. You may want to subscribe to my RSS feed. It's free, you won't receive any spam from me (like, ever), but more importantly: you'll never miss a single word. Thanks for visiting!
And we’re back!
Previously I’d written about how, whilst editing the style-sheet on my former Wordpress theme I had somehow corrupted it. Wordpress freaked out, and refused to accept the theme back in any form, even though it was uploaded correctly in the directory. Wordpress just refused to see it.
I host my Wordpress install on my own server. A corrupted stylesheet wasn’t doing anybody’s eyes any favours so I switched my blog back to the default theme that comes with each new Wordpress install - the infamous and once-loved Kubrick - and went off to sulk.
A little while later I came back to have a look at the mess. I have to say, I was pleasantly surprised.
Why? Well, for starters, the default Wordpress theme is fast. Very fast. Much faster than the adhoc (and overly complicated) theme I’d put together myself, almost from scratch (I had a little help from the Blogging Pro theme).
It’s also very well coded. Maybe a little too well, as after three months of looking at probably fifty different themes and tweaking and poking at most of them, I find Kubrick actually a fairly complex theme to modify. But I persisted, and I liked what I saw.
I liked the simplicity. I liked that every plugin worked on it straight out of the box.
And I like that it was so fast.
It’s important that your blog loads quickly. Most web pages load super-fast on any very modern, high-powered PC or laptop, but what about for everybody else?
I’m in an unusual position that at work I’m limited to accessing the Internet via a very down-specced and old PC that still runs Internet Explorer 6.0 - and barely at that. It’s slow. Frustratingly so. However, this allows me to look at my blog from two distinctly different positions - at home, where my dual-core machine renders every page in a matter of seconds, and at work, where the slightest bit of poor code can mean any blog - and not just mine - can take 30 seconds or more to fully display. This can obviously be quite off-putting for any new visitor to your web site. How many times have you lost patience with a slowly-loading page yourself and clicked the back or home buttons?
Amazingly, my Kubrick-powered blog loaded pretty quickly on the creaky old work computer. I’d estimated about one-third of the time it took to load up under my previous theme (and, indeed, the one before that).
This appealed.
However, while Kubrick’s simplicity is a big part of why it loads so fast, the default Wordpress theme is just too, well, default. It feels like a blank canvas that needs some paint. Sure, it’s perfectly functional and has lots of plusses, but when you surf the Internet it’s hard to escape the feeling that any blog that is powered by Kubrick must be the work of the dreaded newbie. (Many Blogger and Typepad blogs also suffer from this; moreso, in fact, as the options for custimisation on these is even more limited.)
Also, I didn’t like that when Kubrick loaded up a post it removed the sidebar. Yes, I could have tweaked things and probably sorted this out fairly quickly but, as I said, for such a simple front-end I found the theme oddly complex. Additionally, even getting the sidebar to render on every page would not have made the site itself look any less ‘default’.
Every few months I work my way back through all of the many X Greatest Wordpress Themes posts - you can check some out yourself here, here and here - but more often than not I find myself getting quite frustrated with the entire process. Yes, there are many great themes out there, but I tend to find that not many of them feel suitable for my blog. A lot are magnificent to look at but complete overkill for a site like this. Others require too much work to customise, or are immediately off-putting through a sometimes bizarre choice of default colour schemes and images. I’m sure that’s a common occurrence for many of you.
So, I was kind of stuck. I liked Kubrick. I like a look and feel that’s somewhere between minimalist and functional. And I wanted something that I could customise fairly easily.
And then it hit me: K2.
K2 is the follow-up theme to Kubrick, developed by Michael Heilemann, Chris J Davis, Zeo, Steve Lam and Ben Sherratt. It has everything I wanted - speed, functionality, a sort of minimalist feel to it and it’s extremely customisable.
(Read more about K2’s features here.)
Yes - it’s still pretty complicated. You can customise a lot of the basic features thanks to the built-in options that you can access through your Wordpress admin panel, but compared to most of the themes I’ve used in the past (which, while slow to load, were a doddle to edit), getting to the nitty-gritty of K2 hasn’t been exactly an easy process. There’s still one or two things - including one or two CSS calls - that I simply cannot even locate, let alone change!
But it’s so worth it. K2 loads fast, looks effective, totally suits the feel of my blog and each and every plugin I’ve installed runs immediately and perfectly out of the box. Who can ask for more?
Does this mean I will never change my theme again? No, probably not - I’m a blogger, after all. And I’m also a tweaker, although that’s something I’m trying to rectify. At the very least, and certainly after the first couple of weeks or so, I’ll be tweaking K2 a lot less than my previous theme, where, in all honesty, I would find myself spending hours just moving an image or a piece of text around, one pixel at a time, because I wasn’t quite happy. I was never quite happy - therein lies the point.
In the meantime, this is definitely it. Yes, as said, I’ll be doing minor tweaks on certain things over the next few days and I’m not going to sleep until I come up with a decent header image for this page (all ideas greatly appreciated - either email or post in the comments, please), but the theme itself is just grand.
If, like me, when choosing a theme you put a high priority on:
- Speed
- Efficiency
- Compatibility
- Customisation
Then give K2 a look. (It’s also fully compatible with Wordpress 2.5, btw.)
Recent Comments