New Year, New Blog Design

As the year is flying past already, I thought it would be a good time to freshen up my blog design. If you haven’t stopped by my site for a while come and check it out.

I’m still using the awesome Headway theme, but this time it’s on the latest 3.0 version which has been completely rewritten to be even more powerful. It allows you to “draw” your own site by creating grids and boxes where you want things to be, and adding some graphics and you have what you see here. It takes a little getting used to ans is not an “instant theme” but you have so much more flexibility

I actually created a child theme for Headway. This is a good idea with almost any theme, all it is is keeping all my changes in a separate theme to the main Headway theme. Then when any changes/upgrades are made to the main Headway theme I don’t lose any changes to my own site.

Feel free to let me know what you think, I’ll be changing it as I go along.

Blog Tech Guy Now Runs On Headway

You probably haven’t noticed (at least I hope not) but the Blog Tech Guy website now runs off the Headway theme for WordPress. Headway tries to take the programming and technical challenges out of customizing a theme and each version it gets better and better.

Headway Themes — Manage your website with drag and drop layout editing and more!

My design is a wonderful custom design by Nate from Unique Blog Designs and I didn’t want to lose that. With Headway I didn’t have to and hopefully not many people have noticed that I’ve even moved.

So why switch?
There were a few reasons. Being a geek I wanted to see if it was possible. Not just from a technical standpoint but from my own abilities. I customize sites all the time for clients and I wanted to see if what I thought I could do, I could. I’m glad to say I was right!

I also recommend Headway to a lot of people and I wanted to get more hand on experience on how it works and what it does when you ask it to do something. I also wanted to see how easy it was for others to change elements. With 1.7 things are getting easier and easier, and more intuitive.

Can you transfer your site to Headway?
I’ll be lying if I said my transfer was easy. It was straightforward, I had a list of things that needed to be done, and with a few minor hiccups I achieved them. But it wasn’t easy and took about 6 hours. However it’s unlikely that you will be transferring to Headway and wanting to keep exactly the same theme as you have now, like I have. The beauty of Headway is that you can easily make a different layout or design to what you have now and you have ultimate control over colors, fonts, layouts and more.

You can see a video of me taking a quick look at the new features for Headway 1.7 (early September) below. Additional features include a quick start wizard, leaf templates, automatic upgrades, SEO improvements, speed increases and much much more.

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