I began with the basic Rebalance theme for my website. The first thing I changed was the blog post home page. A static homepage was more fitting for the type of content that I was putting on my site, since I wasn’t planning on posting things that needed to be displayed in chronological order. So instead, I opted for a static homepage and then added all of my content as individual pages that can be found through the navigation bar at the top right of the page. As I added parent pages, I also added child pages, so as to limit the choices that the viewer has when looking at the page. Rather than having 13 navigation items immediately visible, I only have 6. I feel this makes the navigation less overwhelming.
I used a serif font for headings and a sans serif font for body text for readability and good hierarchy. I changed the background of the page to an image, which I got for free from Unsplash, but then edited in order to make it dark enough that all the text was still readable. I changed the ‘accent’ color of the theme to red, because I felt it fit with the dark theme of the site. I would have liked to be able to change all the colors – the background, accent, and text color, but that proved difficult in WordPress, so I opted for using the photo background since it gave a bit of texture and allowed me to control the color.
I added widgets at the bottom of the page – one block of custom HTML that includes a short bio, and a photo of myself which I also manipulated in Photoshop to exist in a circular frame. I also added links to my social media in the footer. I felt that this eliminated the need for an “About Me” page, but still gave the viewers a clue about who I was.
Before
After
Madi Schultz 