Regular readers will notice that I have changed the look of Neal Umphred Dot Com: I replaced the older theme (the WordPress default, Twenty Fifteen) with the sleeker, more balanced, and all around lovelier Readit theme by Modern Themes. (There has been some experimentation: there was an interim look to this site that even more dramatic but ultimately less satisfying.)
There were many reasons that I wanted a new look: the Twenty Fifteen theme did not allow a full-width banner/header at the top, nor did it allow a footer at the bottom of each post/page.
Needless to say, Readit allows both. 1
This is how Neal Umphred Dot Com looked with the WordPress default Twenty Fifteen theme. Nice, clean, modern—but not what I was looking for. The theme that I am using now—and that you are looking at now—is Readit by Modern Themes. It is much closer to how I envision things! 2
With Readit, when you click on one of the post excerpts on NUDC’s homepage you are greeted with an enormous, full-screen image that is dramatic and, hopefully, both attention-getting and attention-keeping. As you scroll down to read, the header image has a slight parallax effect, which normally would be too much chrome for my taste, but it words!
The Readit theme gives me a clean post page: header at top, footer below, and no distracting (and unnecessary) sidebar. I like the look and the ease of ‘the read’ with this theme. Also, I was easily able to set the width of the column so that it is 75 characters across, the maximum length that most typographers recommend for setting book pages.
I researched and demoed hundreds of themes before settling on Modern’s Readit. One of the deciding factors was that the thumbnails of the featured images on the homepage were of equal width. Most themes present a scaled thumbnail with varying widths that I find just plain ugly.
When I first downloaded Readit, I received a thank you email notice from one of Modern’s two owners. As I had some questions, I addressed them directly to Robbie and he replied promptly. After a few of these I realized that support columns exist for this sort of thing (bothering owners) and I have been using that ever since.
With each of my questions on the support thread, I have received a prompt response from Robbie addressing my issues to my satisfaction.
So, if you have your own site and are thinking of a new theme, give the Modern Themes website a look-see. You’ll see why I posted this free plug for Modern Themes and Readit Pro! 3
PS: If you are a reader of my other sites, I will be posting articles on each of them that are essentially the same as this one, so you can ignore them. I won’t mind …
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FOOTNOTES:
1 The phrase needless to say means “Very likely or obvious, self-evident. Although nonsensical at first glance—if unnecessary to say, why say it?—this phrase is generally used for emphasis. It originated as needless to speak in the early 1500s.” (The Free Dictionary) Needless to say, virtually every book on proper grammar warns against using these unnecessary three words.
2 Yes, I am using my A Touch Of Gold site as example above: I wrote this peice for that site and am using this image so I don’t have to make a bunch of changes in the this site’s theme stylesheet. Plus I get to plug my Elvis site!.
3 In fact, I opted to upgrade to Readit Pro for the priority support (among other extras) for a modest fee of $18.