I’ve made a few changes to the big blog this morning in an effort to effectively kill two bugs with one stone.
For a while now, I’ve been using a premium theme that I purchased because I liked a few features the premium version had over the free version.
Specifically, these premium features involved a scrolling carousel of featured posts at the top right corner of the front page, a front page video box and a random posts section at the bottom of the front page. But I’ve come to wonder whether those changes were worth it.
The problem was that after adding the reaction buttons plugin (which I’m convinced my readers will eventually embrace, by the way), I find that they appear for the “headline” story on the front page. This created an extra gap below the carousel.
I went to technical support for the theme and inquired, and like nearly everything else I’ve asked about, I was told there was a “customization fee” involved.
By downgrading back to the free version, I find that I can easily up the number of featured posts that display with one simple modification to the code — and that the page loads much faster than it did when it was trying to pull in additional thumbnails.
So I hope this change will make the blog a little more appealing.
Let me know if you see any problems.
FWIW, I love the clean look! Not that the other one was hideous, but I’m definitely a less-is-more kinda gal. 😉
Thanks, Cat. Glad you like. It's rapidly growing on me. The one good thing about having purchased the premium version of this theme is that there are a few elements there that I was able to copy into the code here to get the features I really wanted.
So I guess it isn't a total loss! 🙂