Changing A Theme Should Be Simple.
The observant reader of this blog will have noticed a change in the way in which it displays the content. That’s a fancy way for saying that I changed the theme.
From that there are a couple of experiences that I should really note, so that you can see that there are several things to consider when changing the theme of your blog.
Before I started searching for a new theme I thought I had stored away things that I did not want to lose if the new theme did not accept them readily. I saved my widgets in the widgets store, so that I could get them back if the new theme did not display them.
I backed up my blog. Just in case something went wrong.
It was all looking good for selecting a new theme, so I went ahead with the process.
When I found that Google Analytics was showing no visits for a about 2 days I wondered if it was such a good idea to change the theme. Had people stopped visiting because they didn’t like the new theme?
But the Who’s Online widget was showing the usual number of visits. So what was happening with GA?
Then the AHA! moment. In the old theme, the GA code was stored in the source code for that theme! Since it was no longer active I had to copy the GA code into the new theme. That fixed it!
At about the same time I decided to take another of my blogs in a new direction, and install a new theme on that one. I remembered the GA code on that one! Lesson learned!
Image may be NSFW.
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With the new theme on my other personal blog, I discovered that the theme could have many aspects configured from the dashboard. That makes it much easier to tweak and set up certain features, without having to go into the minefield that can be discovered when manipulating the source code of the theme, as I suggested in an earlier post, to do to tweak your theme.
So, a simple change of theme has provided a couple of useful experiences and things to learn and remember. Blogging is full of these little surprises.
Have you discovered any problems when swapping themes? Add yours in the comments.
