RickardNilsson.se v2.0

I decided to remake my website, since I wasn’t fully satisfied with the old one, and wanted more space for the pictures, and something that was easier to maintain. I don’t know if the remake was a success in those regards, but I hope so. Time will tell.

Last couple of weeks I’ve been thinking about the remake, and whether I should use a commercial platform like SquareSpace, or just buy a more complete theme for WordPress, since I already have my own domain. Look and feel was top priority and maintenance a close second. I tried out SquareSpace, and it was fairly easy to use, and I think it would work great for my purpose. However, I want to be able to adjust details and make the exact look I have in mind, and that is simply not possible with SquareSpace.

Not that the new website necessarily reflects the look I had in mind, but somehow, I feel more relaxed knowing that I can change things in my direction whenever I want to.

The main problem with the old site was that I relied on several plug-ins for creating the galleries. That worked fine, when it worked. However, it was always a nightmare to update them, since it more often than not broke the compatiblity with the other plug-ins, and finally I had enough. That’s why I wanted to have a complete solution where I didn’t heavily depend on 3rd party plug-ins too much. That also means that the solution has to support most things I want to do.

In the end, I chosed the theme Enfold for WordPress. It really is a (very-close-to) complete solution, and it seems to have good support so you can always ask questions and get help if you get stuck with something you want to sidestep. Time will tell, but so far, most of the things have worked very smoothly, even though I still struggle with some details I would have want to do in different ways. Galleries aren’t optimal, and the settings for them are pretty poor in my opinion, but the fact that they have different types of galleries and most of them looks really good out-of-the-box compensates for a lot.

Please tell me what you think about the new site, and if it was an upgrade compared to the last one.