It’s no surprise that I’m using wordpress for this website, and the theme I’m using is called Hestia. As said in another post I’m quite a big fan of the material design language Google uses in Android so I was looking for a theme somewhat reminiscent of that, and Hestia really appealed to me. I did however have to change some things (and still do) to make it look the way I want.
Cleaning up
The standard Hestia theme uses these overly convoluted home and front pages stuffed with all kinds of widgets, so I got rid of the standard front page and made my home page the front page. Then I removed all the useless widgets so now it just shows my last three blog posts and a fun intro message.
Backgrounds
The standard hestia theme doesn’t have much style elements so it looks really clean. Especially once you remove all the useless stuff. So I wanted to give my website a bit of flair by adding a certain type of backgrounds to all pages. I’m a big fan of images of drawing setups, so paper with stuff around it and maybe something drawn on it. These kinds of pictures also seemed appropriate for a portfolio website because they both have to do with stuff you create and gives the website a creative feel. Thus I got some of these images I really like from unsplash and used them across my different pages. I made a credits page for the images I used which you can find in my footer.
Navigation
While there’s a bunch of places you can put your menu’s in hestia, I chose very simply to put it top right in the header. I initially really wanted a hamburger menu, but after trying multiple plugins that allowed for those, I realised the current menu looked way cleaner and nicer so I kept it. I just added some symbols and made some drop-down menu’s. I do find it very annoying that the menu items are in all caps, but I haven’t found a way to change this yet (and I’ve tried) so I really wanna change that in the future. I also made the “Ardlantis” button in the top left as a sort of permanent home button because those are very important in navigation.
Blog page
Similarly to the home page, my blog page needed some cleaning up and a nice background. Standard it has a bunch of widgets on one of the sides, so I reduced those and kept them to the right.
Other things
I made a bunch of other adjustments too, and I’ll talk you through some of them.
- I changed the font from roboto to ubuntu, because the somewhat cartoony look suits my website a little better and it just looks more fun.
- I changed the header to be transparent on the home page because it makes the image look nicer.
- I made the “powered by wordpress” text in the footer say and do something different…
- Removed some other stuff for cleanness
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