After my blog related excitement last week, which was mostly due to signing up for The Blogcademy in London, the last few days have been a huge anti-climax. Mostly because I managed to break my website. Fuck.
This website is still pretty new and I’ve invested more time on the content than the design and layout. However, since looking at some of the other websites belonging to my future Blogcademy colleagues, I’ve decided that I need to improve my blog and get it looking a bit more professional.
I spent a few days searching WordPress themes on Google, looking for something that struck me as both simple yet beautiful. Eventually I found one that fit the bill. It shall remain nameless, however… It featured a striking minimalistic design, impressive image slider and portfolio options. It was a premium theme, but I was willing to cough up £20 or so to improve my blog.
The problems began when I tried to install the theme. WordPress, wisely as it turns out, kept throwing up the most annoying error message ever: “Are you sure you want to continue?” Er, well, yeah…
Eventually I solved the issue – after screaming, “YES!” at the screen about ten times. But somehow I still couldn’t get all the functionality to work; especially that damn slider. I thought it was just me and my lack of technical skills, so after eight or so hours of wrestling with it, I gave up and reverted back to the default WordPress theme.
The next morning I woke up ready to go into battle once more. Unfortunately, I logged on to the dashboard, clicked activate on the new theme and poof, the white screen of death. I couldn’t even log in.
Fast-forward a couple of days and the helpful support team at Bluehost have unlocked my blog and set it back to default. Needless to say, the faulty ‘premium’ theme will not be going anywhere near it in future. I just hope I manage to get a refund.
But I’m still keen to get the site looking good, so over the next few weeks I’ll (carefully) be experimenting with different looks and plugins. If I’m feeling brave, I might even try to install another theme.
Wish me luck…!
[…] weeks ago and have been circling around it making a decision on whether or not to purchase. After a bad experience last time I attempted to install a premium theme, this time I was much more wary and did a lot of […]