Promising but mediocre

  • kalleankaco

    (@kalleankaco)


    8 years ago

    SO it’s nice that WordPress FINALLY gets a business first core theme instead one primarily for blogging. The default WordPress theme has always been a bit boring and lacking in design, so I was hoping that 2017 would finally fixed this.

    They only kinda did.

    Yes, we now have a front page design that’s fairly business-y. It’s not perfect but a step in the right direction. The theme options makes it fairly straight forward to add content to the front page even though I would have preferred using HTML fields instead of linking to pages for each front page section.

    But beyond the front page design, the theme is surprisingly amateurish. On blog posts and pages, the layout looks downright broken with improper layout, spacing, typography, etc, etc.

    For some reason, they removed the sidebars on the pages. Hey we need those for basic site functionality. Are we supposed to put all widgets in the footer now?

    The two column theme option is probably the single worst design feature I’ve seen in a default WordPress theme and that says a lot considering how poorly designed the core themes usually have been. What’s the purpose of having two columns if the left column is only used for the page’s h1 element?! The entire page layout looks maligned and incredibly wasteful.

    The default typography is sometimes illegible due to poor kerning. For instance, ‘I’ and ‘L’ look confusingly the same. The insistence of having headings (h1, h2, etc) in uppercase reduces readability and it looks plain ugly and outdated. Also, let’s please stop this trend of having the page h1 much smaller then sub headings.

    I’m too tired to go on. Why is it so damn hard for the dev team to create a good default theme after all these years? Why is Twenty Seventeen so amateurishly designed? If you can’t competently design the default theme yourselves, reach out to the community, these are many businesses that would love to provide a theme for free (hint: they already do it in the theme directory).

    • This topic was modified 8 years ago by kalleankaco.
    • This topic was modified 7 years, 12 months ago by kalleankaco.
    • This topic was modified 7 years, 12 months ago by kalleankaco.
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  • Completely agree about wasted space and the typography problems! Another problem–pages end up with more than one H1–a big accessibility problem.

    Thread Starter kalleankaco

    (@kalleankaco)

    I actually had to use another theme because 2017 simply isn’t worth the effort. Wish that www.remarpro.com didn’t rely on Automattic for their core themes and made a better effort to design a theme that’s literally used by hundreds of thousands of sites.

    • This reply was modified 7 years, 12 months ago by kalleankaco.
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