Kia ora!
In case you’ve arrived back on my blog of SamuelMcNeill.com and wondered if you have in fact come to the right place, I thought I should say that I’ve launched a new theme for the blog. The home page now looks as follows:
Part of the motivation to change to a new theme was just that – change can be good! I’ve been blogging on SamuelMcNeill.com for just under a year now using a pretty traditional “scroll of death” type blog theme and I felt that having a more visually inspiring theme might help people read a wider variety of my blogs. I was a little surprised to see that I’ve posted well over 100 blog posts since the start of the year and yet many of the older posts were not being read regularly.
With this new theme I’ve tried to separate out the categories to promote wider reading – I still have the “Latest Posts” showing up near the top of the home page:
However, what you should also notice is that each post is now colour-coded by the category e.g. yellow is for Office365, red is for Tips&Tricks and blue for Professional Development. Similarly, as you scroll down the home page you will see specific sections by category, so below you’ll see the Data Analytics and Win10 categories with recent posts in them:
A couple of nice things I liked about the theme was the ability to add icons to the menus, and I was able to use a few that matched up quite nicely with my categories:
Menus turn blue when you move the mouse over them
The search feature in action.
Finally, the search feature in the theme starts looking through the blog as you enter key words to search for, with a dynamic list of suggestions. In this example, I used the key word “Intune” and the following blog posts were provided, with a link to all matches. As a fully responsive design theme, it adapts well for viewing on mobiles and tablets as well, whilst still retaining the key elements of the look and feel from the desktop theme.
Ultimately, it’s a cosmetic change but I do hope that as readers you find the content still as useful as ever. I’d welcome any feedback so feel free to drop a comment in the box below.
There is actually a bunch of additional features that come with this theme that I’ve yet to fully explore and implement and will spend a couple of evenings over the coming weeks figuring out if they’re going to add value to my blog. In the end, it’s still about technology and education primarily here, and that focus won’t change.
Thanks for reading and if you’d like to receive the digest email of my blogs that I post every 2-3 weeks then you can sign up here to receive only the summary of them.
