It was time for a change… perhaps not a completely fresh look but something a little tidier than what I already had up and running. A few months back I stumbled across a problem with the Mystique theme I had been using for the past 24-36 months. While responding to some comments I discovered that some replies were missing.  The replies and content was in the actual HTML source but was being hidden from display probably from some obsecure DIV element or CSS property. In any case I quickly threw up a copy of Twenty Twelve and hacked together a few quick changes to a child theme to get everything running. That kludge did the trick and restored visibility to all the comments.

Professional

While Twenty Twelve worked, it didn’t look very professional and that was completely my fault. As a budding web developer I hadn’t spent the appropriate amount of time digging into the code and discerning all relationship between all the different HTML elements and the CSS properties.

A few of my stalwart colleagues would probably suggest I let someone else design me a theme. Well I enjoy learning, really I do, and there’s no better way to learn in my opinion other than just picking up the brush and putting some ink up on the canvas. In this case trying to understand the interaction of the HTML elements and the CSS properties.

I’ve been hearing quite a lot about the Genesis Framework for sometime now and was considering have a look at it. However, I realized that I had purchased a developer copy of the Thesis Framework about 2-3 years ago so I decided to spend sometime messing around with Thesis 2.1 before trying yet another framework. What you see today (August 2013) is the result of me making one a few different changes. Thanks to the tutorials on Build Your Own Business Website I was quickly able to grasp the functionality of Thesis.

I won’t comment which is better or worse… because I haven’t tried Genesis yet, I’m still trying to learn and understand all the features behind Thesis. If I ever get a chance to test drive Genesis, then I’ll be sure to add my $0.02 to that conversation. Right now, I’ll probably continue to play with the CSS styling, not really exited about Georgia although I’m not sure I want to take the performance penalty of relying on a Google font.

I’m also curious what impact Thesis will have on the speed of my site and the content generation times, might need to run some benchmarks there just for later comparison. I know Twenty Twelve included some Google fonts which tended to slow things down a little, don’t believe that’s the case with the default Classic Responsive theme in Thesis although I believe you can add those fonts through the API.

Feel free to let me know what you think…

Cheers!