My site may look a bit wonky for awhile – I’m not sure how wonky or for long. I gotta switch themes.
Like most personal WP sites, I don’t have a dev/test environment. I develop right in production. It’s a terrible practice, and I cringe and fret about it, but that’s just the way WP is set up to work by default.
And … I gotta switch themes. I started off years ago using the Twenty Eleven theme, and really liked it. Unfortunately it was the last Twenty-something theme that was not responsive – i.e. not mobile-friendly. A couple of years later everything was going responsive, and seemingly every WP expert was extolling (correctly, it turns out) the imperative of switching to a responsive theme.
I looked around and settled on a theme with “responsive” right smack in the name – Responsive II (aka Responsive Mobile) from CyberChimps. Again, I really liked it. It was the intended successor to the popular Responsive theme from the same company. But, while Responsive continues to be reasonably popular, and thus actively supported, Responsive II never really caught on, and support has withered.
I recently received notice from Google that something or another (I can’t remember what at the moment and can’t find the notice) has been deprecated and I will be punished in search engine rankings starting in April. I looked into it and figure I could probably fix it (there is no sign CyberChimps intends to do so), but it would be a temporary, stop-gap measure. It’s a no-longer-supported theme and sooner or later I gotta move on. I might as well bite the bullet and make the switch now.
Back to the Theme directory. This time I determined to pick a very popular theme that is likely to be supported for the foreseeable future. Astra looks cool, is very popular, very well-reviewed, super-customizable, and support seems prompt, polite, and knowledgeable. It continues to amaze me what great tools the fantastic WP community makes available for free. So, I’m giving Astra a try but it may take a while to tweak it just right. In the meantime, please forgive my site wonkiness.
