I do a minor redesign to my blog, here's why

Since I move my blog from dev.to to wordpress 6 months ago (read more about this), I do the research and trial to make the design simple yet convenience for everyone to visit and read my posts. Let me tell more about it.

Choosing the theme

The first thing I did before I built my blog on wordpress is choosing themes. I know, I can have exactly how the design I desired to be by making it from scratch but I want to give it a try to thousands wordpress themes out there that might be suitable for my needs and also to save more time to built it.

For blogging only sites, actually it doesn’t need a fancy features-rich kinda themes because the main goals is to make sure my viewers or readers have convenience to read my posts and my thoughts reach them well.

Seedlet theme

Finally this Seedlet theme catches my attention. I activate it and use it default settings for a while, until I feel that this still a bit too much.

What I wanna change, and why I wanna change that

I want my visitor able to see my posts more on a single screen at the home page. Current themes can’t provide it well, it has a big image thumbnail taking up space on screen especially on mobile screen. Take a look this one:

before the redesign

To see a glance of current posts, visitors need to do couple of scrolls which I think not convenience considering more time it need to scroll through the posts. So I need to change it more simple so in one screen, it can contain more posts with thumbnail, title, and short of its description. If the visitor interested to read more, they always can tap on it. Now take a look at this:

after the redesign

See the differences? It more simple, to the point, and visitor can read more posts title at a glance. I also remove the author, date, category, tag, and Leave a comment word from home page to lead visitor to click the post and read the complete post instead of just read it on the homepage. Now see the differences on desktop mode:

before the redesign (desktop mode)

after the redesign (desktop mode)

On desktop mode, the differences are more obvious, more posts can showed in one page. And now it has pagination with number to give visitor ideas on which page now they are looking at. All of this are able to achieve by using Blog Designer For Elementor plugin (click here to visit).

Blog Designer For Elementor Plugin

This plugin is using elementor so if you want to use this plugin, make sure you already install elementor also. Using this plugin is pretty straightforward. You only need to make new page to be your home page, edit with elementor, and add the “Post Layouts” component which you can find under Blog Designer section in Elementor.

Using Blog Designer in elementor (ignore the messy preview, always check on new tab)

Once you added the Post Layouts, you can set however you want your posts shown via the Content tab on the left.

Content tab settings

And the last, on your dashboard go to Settings -> Reading and choose your homepage displays to a static page and select the page that you have edited before. Voila!

Thanks for reading until the end. Hope you have more convenience experience to read my future posts after this minor redesign. Please reach me on anywhere.