Updated on June 14, 2022
Last week saw WordPress 4.1 released, and with it, a new default theme, Twenty Fifteen. Also with it came me deciding it was time to give my site a newer look. I looked over Twenty Fifteen and while it’s nice, a few things about it kept me from switching (the way it handles header images, for one).
After way too much searching through multiple themes, messing with child theme code, etc., I finally settled on moving from Ridizain (a modified Twenty Fourteen theme) to GeneratePress. While I suppose it’s a freemium theme (a few plugins/support are offered for a fee), it seems well supported, receives regular updates (last updated a week ago), and reasonably popular (over 100,000 downloads from WordPress.org as of this writing).
While it’s similar to the previous theme in some respects, I also have a few extra options. One is switching the fonts (and choosing from a large range of Google Fonts) through a GeneratePress setting, which gives me better-looking post headlines. I went with Noto Sans, the sibling font of Noto Serif (the new Twenty Fifteen theme default).
Another plus is that featured images won’t be cut off at the bottom by the post headline anymore.
Finally, my site hopefully looks better on mobile devices, addressing a few remarks/suggestions about that. Related to such is making the theme look flatter, with the site logo also flatter/smaller, per current design trends.
Flickr Creative Commons photo by Nikolay Bachiyski.
