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I have secretly been working on a new website

As you may notice I have given the website a new look. This is a project that I have secretly been working on for a pretty long time. While a lot of stuff may look similar but with a fresh coat of paint. There are actually a lot of changes in the back end of the site.  This resulted in a lot of work setting up the old structure of the site that you and I have been custom to. Let’s go over some of the changes and why.

Dark Theme

While the current trend is to have a white theme as your website design, I actually moved to a dark theme. This works nicely with the theme of the games I’m currently covering, but it also allows me to give additional guidance by using colors more effectively. Also, I often work in the late hours and a dark theme is easier on the eyes.

Future Proof

The current website still runs on the same Content Management System (CMS) called WordPress. However, I did change to a different theme that was also made by the creator of the previous theme. This new theme, therefore, has a lot of overlap with the previous one if you look at the basics on the front end of the site. But actually on the back-end of things I’m able to do some sweet new stuff. The previous Theme didn’t let me build HUBs in HUBs. Therefore I wasn’t able to create a dedicated HUB for each of the Battleborn heroes and link relevant content to them. This is something I’m planning to do in the near future and not just with the Battleborn heroes. This allows me to go much more in-depth on specific topics.

The Struggle

This theme was originally designed to have a light/white look. Getting the look just right and staying true to the color palette of the previous theme was a bit of a struggle. But this was nothing in comparison to transferring the site to the new theme.

The creator of these two themes does have a conversion tool. However, when using this it sets up your site in a different way and ignores your site structure.  Changing pages into posts and thereby creating a lot of 404 error pages as the previous content is moved to a different URL.

The new theme did streamline some stuff by providing default tabs for all the HUB pages. However, these default tabs lacked specific filter options and were applied to all HUBs. I don’t need these default tabs on all of the HUBs. So instead of going for the easy default solution, I needed to take control and set up everything manually. This gives you more specific content that you are actually looking for. In order to get that I needed to set up all the pages again and link them accordingly to their specific HUB.

This new theme did reserve the URL for these default tabs. So if I created a page on that reserved URL it resulted in empty pages. This was because the settings for the default tab were turned off. Therefore the theme thought that it didn’t need to show content. To avoid this problem I needed to trick the theme by reserving different URLs for the default tabs.

There are around 1500 posts on my website. The new theme stores some data differently therefore I manually had to check all posts if they showed the correct content. A lot of posts showed no sidebar because the data got lost. Some posts showed the featured image and a video on the top of the article while it only needed to show the video.

Not Done

While I manually went through a lot of posts and fixed a lot of stuff there is probably some stuff that still needs fixing. So if you see something that needs my attention let me know by sending me a message through the contact form.

Written by
I'm a Content Creator by day and a BattleBread Baker at night. I'll provide you with your recommended slice of entertainment! I'm a Gearbox Community Badass and a proud member of the official Borderlands & Tiny Tina's Wonderlands Creator Team (2K Games / NextMakers).

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