I was looking at my WordPress website and was trying to decide whether to make changes to its look. I couldn’t make up my mind if I should upgrade my current theme to a much cooler and better version or to change it entirely.
For people who didnt know, I keep my wordpress blog abreast with the same content as my LJ. The initial idea was to move to wordpress entirely but I scraped that idea after realizing the ease of reaching people thru LiveJournal. The WordPress seduction is mostly that you have everything in your control. From the basic themes, comments, webspace to plugins, galleries, podcasts ect. As a matter of fact most of the large images are uploaded to my wordpress site first and simply hotlinked to from LJ. Same goes for the podcasts I did a long time back.
Off late I have been pushing my Livejournal blog more, the reason being that almost 95% of the comments on my blog have been on LJ. But the readership on WP has remained very impressive(about 45 subscribers to the feed according to feedburner) and for that reason I will continue putting a little effort on the WP side as often as possible.
That brings me to my current situation. Should I put in the effort of changing the theme? Changing the theme is not as straight forward as it seems, I have too much tweaks on the php code that all my little widgets might simply disappear(all this happened before they were supported by WP). Not to mention the Gallery 2 integration that is simply beautiful in the current theme.
I always looked at theme as something like a trailer to the movie. The fact is most people I know simply read the blog via a RSS aggregator. (In case I am wrong and you are reading this off the website please leave a comment ).
Even my LJ theme is about 2 years old, I figured most of my LJ friends read it off their friends page. The LJ theme is actually for me, considering the amount of time I spend on my very own friends page, its nice to have a theme I feel is very easy to use.
After checking the stats of my WP blog, I realized that most of the non regular visitors are from search engines (google and yahoo are very kind on my site). They seach specific topics and visit the page, sometimes they like what they see and browse the site for similar content. This is what prompted me to add a plugin displaying a list of similar posts at the end of each page
So here are the questions for you:
* How often do you visit my blog? Or do you mostly read my posts off an aggregator?
* Is there something about my blog design you find unnecessary? If yes which parts?
If you have your own blog/site
* How often do you change the theme of the blog?
* Does it make a huge difference?
Thanks again for helping me out :)