Today is Sunday time to look back in the rearview mirror and talk about my week . I am linking up to the Sunday Post hosted for years by Kimberly@caffeinatedreviewer .

In my private life

This week I was off work and spent my time at home with my son and husband as we all had time off.
It was filled with walks in the countryside, reading, listening to Red Rising series (I am smitten), watching Vampire Diaries (and laughing at my hubby and son’s comments as they hate Elena!) and…

Revamping my blog!

This had taken the whole week!

I had told you last Sunday all about my problems with my former host OVH and why I fled them for Siteground thanks to the huge help of my husband.

Well, I thought that as I was using an old free theme pre-Gutenberg, maybe it was also time to look for a new theme that had been built with blocks in mind.

Let me tell you that the whole week I looked at themes, compared the speed, response time, look and…drove my poor husband crazy for changing my mind all the time!
But to say the truth, I was overwhelmed!

There are so many possibilities, so many things you can do now that I had problems visualizing what my blog would look like.
Most themes offered complicated pages to add lots of sub pages,testimonies, group of pages etc etc. Or had a landing page that didn’t truly look like the latest posts and you had to clik on “blog” in the menu to really go look at reviews for example.

So yes, I was drigving my husband crazy as he was doing all the technical heavy lifting and I had “just” to focus on the art and appearance side.

And then… I saw Kadence theme.
And in their Starter Themes there were some for blogs and…they looked clean, simple, airy!

After that it took us two days to tweak it on a mock up site my husband had created at Siteground to have it look like what I wanted. I will have to resize images so now you’ll see a blend of “old” and new images but it should smooth out the more new images I am adding.

It took only four hours to my husband to stage my blog (create a replica of the old one), upload and test the theme on that stagging then manually migrate to my production website with the new features!

I will never thank my husband enough as he spent 10 days of his holiday helping me out here!!!

Now we still have things to smooth out here and there but it should be running without too many problems!
The last thing we have done is move my domain name but that won’t be active before 01/13 so let’s hope that does not make the site crash down!

Could you give me your feedback on the new site in the comments below? If I have things not working or to improve?

Already a huge thank you!

On the blog this week (click on the picture to read the post)

Well given all we did to revamp the site, I only published two posts this week but next week and the weeks after should be much better now that I am (hopefully) in a stable place with the site.

https://www.bewareofthereader.com/iron-widow-by-xiran-jay-zhao-totally-blew-me-away-review/

Thanks for reading!

Sophie

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65 Comments

  3. The site is looking great. It sounds like you guys spend a lot of time working on it.
    Have a great week and happy reading.

    Reply

  4. What a lot of work you put into this, Sophie – your hubby is a trooper! I really like the look of it, but I still can’t “like” the post. Is that just me or do other readers have the same problem?

    Reply

    1. The like button is coming from jetpack which require a wordpress.com accout to be logged on to see it.
      Some info here : https://jetpack.com/support/likes/
      The issue with wordpress and jetpack is that everything is “linked” to wordpress.com and some functionalities aren’t working well outside of that “microcosm”

      Reply

    2. It seems that today it’s just you Teri. But the likes come from Jetpack and as my hsuabdn said, that plugin gives a lot of problems. But if I don’t use the plugin, I won’t show on the WP reader and no one will know that I have new posts… So I am between a rock and a hard place.

      Reply

  5. True, a lot of customizations were made regarding caching at server side, jetpack, at plugin level/preloading/lazy loading….. In the beginning not everything were smooth. Still some “strange” behavior with smash balloon plugin (instagram). Normally it’s ok now.
    But soon Cloudflare CDN will be activated to allow better loading time for US.
    So don’t hesitate to give feedback at anything which seems odd or if you have questions

    Reply

  6. Lovely new look, indeed! It’s clean, it’s pleasing to the eye and it loads very quickly – on a “technical” note, these past few days before the change I found myself unable to leave a “like” on your posts because that section kept ‘loading’ but did not appear, while now everything works smoothly. 🙂

    Reply

  7. I looked at this post and the homepage and I think they both look great. I prefer homepages that offer a picture and blurb for your most recent posts like yours and mine do. Changing themes is so time consuming but it’s always nice to freshen up your blog. Hubby is so great for helping. Hope you have a wonderful week!

    Reply

  13. I’d be overwhelmed if I had to try and do my blog over. Sounds like you have a wonderful husband! I’d have to have mine help me too. For now I’m staying on Blogger because it’s the easiest option for me.

    Reply

  14. Your week sounds wonderful! I am glad you were all able to have time off together. I love the look of your new site! I get overwhelmed easily when looking into stuff like that as well. Thank goodness for my husband who often helps me too! I hope you have a great week!

    Reply

  18. This looks lovely, Sophie! And isn’t it special to have another half who looks after us so very well?? I’m glad you enjoyed your time off. Here’s hoping the coming week is a good one.

    Reply

  19. Congrats on your new site! And it looks great. I am here after a long time, and your site is welcoming and calm. Happy New year!

    Reply

  21. Great looking site, and what a great husband! I do like to play around with my blog and change themes now and then. I’m not a fan of Block Editor and how it affects making these changes.

    Enjoy your week!

    Reply

  23. Well, as someone who loves type and design, this is looking great, Sophie. I love the softness and easy readability of the text and the size of the text is perfect. I’d say give your hubby a steak and a gold button for patience and effort! He did a fab job.

    Reply

  25. Oh that sounds like a lot of work!

    The problem you described with having to click on “blog” in the menu is something I’ve noticed too. I found out it’s because the homepage was set to display a “static page” instead of my latest posts. After changing that setting, it was solved.

    I moved my blog as well this week as I had holidays too. I found a small plugin that makes a dark mode possible and it’s such a life saver!

    Reply

  26. Congrats on your new site! I’m reading this on my phone and it looks great. I can tell you are already so much happier Your husband rocks!

    Reply