Upgrading to the Interphase Theme

When I originally started this blog, I quickly found a free theme that I liked so I could get to writing my content. The theme was functional and looked pretty good, but I was never totally happy with it. Part of my dislike of the original theme was due to my own laziness and not updating the “featured content” box in the upper right hand corner and other things that had to be updated by hand. Personally, I use WordPress for a reason, so I have to do as little hand coding as possible when setting up my sites and my original theme just had too much to be hand coded.

The other problem that I had with my original theme was it was free. Don’t get me wrong, I use and love WordPress because it is free, but a lot of times free plugins and free themes tend to break when WordPress is upgraded and free WP authors are not required to keep their code up to date. Why should they? These people are not getting paid for what they do, they code these plugins and themes because they are learning, they really like to do it, they are trying to drum up business, or even just building links. No matter why they do this, it’s a free service they are offering for the rest of us.

So, I decided to look into a premium theme to use on this and my other blogs. Although, I really liked the idea of how the Thesis and Flexsqueeze themes work, for some reason I have been afraid of these because everything I read about these themes seems to be over my head at this point in time. Also, I was afraid to pay almost $200 for a theme that may take me another month to figure out how to use it.

One day, I just happened to be reading one of my favorite WordPress blogs, WP Tavern or Theme Lab and noticed an ad for Elegant Themes in the sidebar. I took a gander through all of the themes available and then I went to check out the price thinking it at least has to be a $100 one time payment or $20 a month. I was completely surprised to find out that a membership to their site is only $20 a year. At the time when I signed up, there must have been at least 25 themes already available and since then they have released about 2 new themes a month. Except for the logos, all of their themes are ready to go for you right out of the box. Of course, I always seem to be tweaking something, but for the most part my tweaking only takes about an hour or so.

Out of this great collection of themes, why did I choose Interphase?

1. It has a clean look, while offering a lot of content on the home page.
2. There weren’t a lot of graphics in this theme that I would have to remove. Sometimes the headers at Elegant Themes are geared towards a certain niche, this was not one of them.
3. My old logo fits right into the header without having to resize it. This made for a real smooth transition.
4. As with all of the Elegant Themes, many of the customizations that I wanted do do were done right in their custom menu section.
5. It offered a widget for the 125 x 125 ad section. This way I could get around to this part when I want to instead of having blank ads sitting there all looking stupid.
6. It was compatible across all browsers. No screwing around with making my own custom CSS for IE6 and IE7. If you’re reading this blog using either of these browsers, I urge you to upgrade to Firefox or Chrome. You will never go back to IE unless you absolutely have to.

Customizing Interphase.

As with all of the themes have used from Elegant Themes, the code is extremely easy to read if you do need to customize it. I may be wrong, but I think I only made one change to this theme from the original download and that was making the header a touch smaller. I noticed that on my laptop my content was being pushed below the fold and I didn’t like that. Making the header smaller would allow even more of my content to show on an even larger screen. I also resized the font from 11px to 12px. I was having a real difficult time reading things at the smaller font size.

So, for the time being, this blog will be running Interphase, unless I see something I absolutely fall in love with that Elegant Themes releases in the future.

If you have any other questions, please feel free to post them in the comments below.

Until later,

Thank you for taking the time to visit and read my blog. If you choose to make a purchase through any of the links on this page I may be compensated by your purchase. I really appreciate your support and hope to see you back soon.

Originally posted 2010-05-30 17:36:39. Republished by Blog Post Promoter

Related posts:

1. In Review Theme Review

One Response to “Upgrading to the Interphase Theme”

1. Snow says:

   July 7, 2011 at 11:13 am

   Thank you for an informative blog; I am trying to make a decision of which theme from Elegant Themes to use, and I need one with add space.

   This is one I am thinking about!