Simplifying the Site

After a couple of years of maintaining the basic look and feel of this site, I have decided to begin a major overhaul of the look and feel as well as the content. The key premise of this change is simplicity. I will be using analytics to drive rearranging and categorizing content.

Horizontal Post Slider

For those that have visited the site often, the most noticeable change is the loss of the horizontal post slider (like CSS tricks). While it is a cool feature and taught me a lot about CSS Grid, it doesn’t drive a lot of traffic to individual articles. The CSS and the video on how to create this will not go away, and I have added a page that shows how it works, along with an auto-scrolling slider.

Basic Design

I continue to look at ways to simplify the styling through the use of global settings and CSS. While Avada is great with global settings, it is not so great when adopting modern CSS. I have talked about this before, so I am not going to repeat it here again.

Colors

I have a bit of an issue when it comes to the visual colors of the site. I love dark mode in most cases, but I find sites that are fully dark quickly get annoying to read. I do hope that the Avada team adds an easy-to-implement dark mode so that I can offer it to site visitors. The latest color change is a switch back to the tech indigo, which is very popular and gives the site a very clean and simple look.

ACF Pro

In the recent announcement, the Avada team stated that the upcoming release would support the repeater. This has the potential to be a huge enhancement. Unfortunately, since ACF didn’t have built-in taxonomy and post-type features, I used Meta Box. With ACF adding those features and Avada supporting the ACF repeater, I may need to make some major changes which will again impact design. While I doubt it will happen, it would be nice if Avada’s repeater support extended to the Meta Box repeater.

Gutenberg, Gutenberg, Gutenberg

As I seem to do in all of my articles, I have to mention Gutenberg and the lack of inherent support within Avada. I am hopeful this will change soon, or Avada will be a thing of the past within the next couple of years. I am continuing to experiment using a mix of Gutenberg and Avada, but right now, it is limited. Gutenberg does help create very simple layouts, not that it can’t be complex, but the block model tends to favor the content as the feature and not the design. Whether using Gutenberg or Avada, the goal for the entire site will be to balance simplicity without becoming boring.