Since I have never had much experience with WordPress, nor have much experience with it, I approached the setup of this blog site with a grain of salt. My attitude was further reinforced when I went to the Themes section for the first time. I was supposed to choose a theme among a collection of 331 preinstalled ones.
Fortunately, it turned out that I was not limited to any of these themes. Our tutor Costas Papadopoulos was kind enough to install any theme we fancied.
Independent Publisher 2
After spending some time browsing and searching for a good looking and minimalistic theme, I stumbled upon Independent Publisher 2.
Independent Publisher 2 is a clean and polished theme with a light colour scheme, bold typography, and full-width images. It’s designed to enhance your content and provide an immersive experience for your readers. With a focus on readability, the content looks crisp and easy on the eyes. Independent Publisher 2 is responsive, adjusting its layout to accommodate various devices and screen sizes.
Raam Dev, creator of Independent Publisher 2
Okay, I am sold. It seemed to tick all the right boxes.
Minimalistic and content–firstMobile-friendlyFlexible and customizable
Well, the last one turned out to be half true. More on that in a minute.
Minimalistic and Content–first
Since I was setting up a blog, a theme that emphasizes on the text and the content was exactly what I was looking for, and Independent Publisher 2’s focus on content and typography manages to achieve just that.
Mobile-friendly
63% of all US online traffic comes from smartphones and tablets.
Having this in mind and settling with a theme that is good looking but not mobile-friendly was a no-brainer. Especially given the blog’s future audience, which is expected to be students, tutors and people with an interest in media and technology. Fortunately, Independent Publisher 2 supports both phones and tablets straight out of the box.
Flexible and Customizable
As I can be quite picky when it comes to colors and typography, naturally, I wanted a theme that gives me full control over these design elements. Unfortunately, however, with Independent Publisher 2, the customization of these elements turned out to be a bit trickier.
Setup and Customization
Before setting the blog up, I quickly wrote down the site’s architecture. However simple this site is, going through the process helped me to pen down my thoughts and the document served as a reference point throughout the whole process.
After setting up the blog, creating all the necessary pages and choosing a couple of widgets, I went to the Appearance tab to customize the way it looks. This is where I started questioning my choice of theme.
What I wanted to do was to change the color and font size of the site’s title, the font size and color of the navigation and the heading size here and there and a couple of other minor things. What I thought were pretty straightforward things to do, turned out to be almost impossible with this theme.
The Power of WordPress plugins
After some googling for a solution, I found that at least I wasn’t the only one having this issue. As it turns out, WordPress lives by a motto that is very similar to Apple’s “There’s an app for that”, it goes: “There’s a plugin for that.”
Simple CSS Plugin
In order to make the changes I had mentioned above, I needed to edit and overwrite the theme’s CSS properties. Thanks to Simple CSS and a very rusty set of CSS skills, I finally managed to make the theme look the way I wanted.
Before 
This plugin gave me the opportunity to:
- Change the site’s title font face, font size, and color
- Change the menu’s active and hovers states, as well as its color, font face and font size
- Change the color, font face and font size of the Recent post’s heading and entries below
- Hide the horizontal line in-between posts
- Change the button styling throughout the whole blog
- Hide the WordPress text inside the footer
Note: You can find the current CSS code here.
All in All
Now that I have (almost) finished this blog, I think differently of WordPress. Yes, the site will end up being bloated with plugins and child themes. Yes, most of the themes are not that good looking. And yes – it has one of, if not, the most confusing admin dashboards I’ve ever seen on a site builder.
That being said, WordPress is accessible and has a relatively small learning curve allowing pretty much anyone to build a website, blog or an online store. It also has an amazing and inspiring community, with the help of which you can find a solution to almost any problem.