Psst! I updated the blog … and why I waited so darn long

So, thanks to wonderful reader Emily W., I have had my bum kicked into doing something about updating this blog. (Thank you! I emailed you but I think it may have gone to spam. 🙁 )

The blog now looks like this with the latest 6 posts sliding across the top, and a floating menu bar at the top that follows you down with social media icons on the right:

I also spent considerable amount of time organizing my categories, and now I have a Categories index page with my sub-categories clearly listed out, and you can access it easily in the menu bar at the top as well:

I also have a short compendium of starter posts for the beginners here

For those of you who are curious about why it took me so long, keep reading.

Sunk Cost got to me

I didn’t want to really update the blog because to be honest with you, I wasted a lot of money on my custom theme with some janky developers (a scam artist, he is), and it just never flowed / fit together because it was so highly customized.

As a result, because of this sunk cost of a few thousand in my head (yes, THOUSANDS), I couldn’t bear to get rid of my old blog theme.

But, I am cutting my losses (just like on the stock market), and am letting that monstrous money-sucking theme go.

Instead, I spent time (hours, really), perusing through all the WordPress themes possible, with no real budget (listen, after a few thousand, $100 is peanuts), and I purchased this theme – WonderBlog.

What I looked for:

• Fully Responsive – Meaning on any browser, it resizes properly and reformats
• Included a Mobile Theme – I used to use the plugin WP Mobile and I still like it, but if I can cut the excess fat/waste on the blog with keeping plugins lean and clean, all the better
• Customizable – This one is not perfect, there are a lot of things I am trying to dig through to fix like the size of some fonts, etc, but it is almost there, and I am not a coder by any means
• Fast Loading – My old theme was bloated because it was so customized and done badly by the first developers, and as a result, it took forever to load, so I wanted something that was very quick, or as quick as it could be anyway
• I wanted a menu at the top with social media icons, a simple large header section for my logo, and the menu to float / follow as you scroll down the screen
• I also like a sidebar for widgets and ads, and would have preferred a footer widget area rather than the Instagram theme scroll I got but I’m fine with it as-is

I am also looking now into upgrading my servers/hosting. I think it is time.

Anyway, thanks for being patient, and I VERY MUCH appreciate all your comments and do take them to heart. <3

For the other themes I looked at, here they are to save you trouble (not all of them had my entire wishlist above though, but I saw other merits in them).

• SimpleArticle
• HEAP
• Grand Blog
• Let’s Blog
• Shiroi Hana
• Kelta
• Florence

They are all magazine-style, and at the very least, let you have a real logo header across the top, rather than a small one at the top. I like a definitive, clean section to show you that you’ve come to my blog.