Website Redesign: Cardinal Acres Photography

If you work with WordPress long enough, you eventually find yourself in a situation where your theme has been abandoned by its developer. Usually, you can limp along for a while without updating the theme but the time comes when an update to WordPress core or one of your plugins breaks the theme in some way.

That was the situation I found myself in with my photography website, Cardinal Acres Photography.

Fortunately, switching themes is generally not too onerous if you avoid using any non-standard features that a theme might implement. For this reason, I generally avoid the use of site editors like Beaver Builder, Divi Builder, Elementor, Themify Builder, WP Bakery, etc. Once you lock yourself into using one of these proprietary site editors it takes significant work to transition away from them.

Gutenberg is the future of WordPress and it should be able to do most (if not all) of what the proprietary site editors can; in the future, Gutenberg will also likely implement features not possible with 3rd party site editors due to Gutenberg being part of WordPress core.

The redesigned Cardinal Acres Photography site was a pretty straightforward transition once I decided upon the Pinhole theme. This was primarily due to my use of standard WordPress posts for each of my photo galleries and Pinhole’s ability to override the standard WordPress gallery function with its own custom galleries. I also retained all the plugins used for the previous site only adding the To Top plugin to implement an easy, one-click way to return to the top of a page.

While the “redesign” wasn’t exactly “install new theme, activate it and done”, it wasn’t much more work than that. If you stick to a policy of installing only the plugins you absolutely need and avoid using features not implemented by WordPress itself, your next WordPress site redesign can be mostly straightforward and simple as well.