Kay lives here

working with the web

Unveiling Kay Lives Here v3

Or wait, is it version 4? There were a couple of different lime green theme variations in the early days, but I’ve lost count.

After far too long, I have finally migrated this site to a WordPress-friendly hosting account (Linux with Apache). Previously, I had been running on a Windows ColdFusion server, which was great for ColdFusion apps but which WordPress was never happy with. Stands to reason really – the whole thing (PHP on IIS) was a bit of a failed experiment. On the new hosting server I’m able to update to the latest version of WordPress and the latest versions of all my favorite plugins and everything is humming along very nicely.

There are obviously the visual changes as well. I spent a long time considering my options with the themes. I could have had a custom theme designed, but I had trouble deciding what I really wanted. I found some so-called “premium” themes that I liked visually – but the markup underneath was less than exemplary. I debated with myself whether this mattered, but in the end I just couldn’t get comfortable with bad HTML.

But then, I found Yoko, a HTML5 theme with a responsive design (i.e. the layout adapts gracefully to different resolutions) by Elmastudio. I applied some tweaks (by creating a child theme), added my own header images, and the result is what you can see here. Yoko is free, but I would gladly have paid for the theme given the cleanliness and beauty of the underlying code. Elmastudio offers four other WordPress themes (three commercial and one other free) and they all look clean and lovely, and well worth checking out.

I still have some work to do – for example, Firefox is not displaying the Google fonts correctly – but for the most part, I feel it’s ready for prime time. So let me know if you find anything odd!

 

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