This is the first post of the relaunched Sharp Innovation Solutions blog with a totally new theme.
Unexpectedly this has been a long time coming because what was once easy became very difficult. Previously I could control all the design parameters for all aspects of the theme especially the header layout. This was way ahead of every other theme at the time. I invested heavily in time and money for a lifetime license for a product that was a joy to use and provided design capabilities available nowhere else. I tried to stick with the Headway theme through two generations of updates but while they provided some new advanced features in the new versions they also had a lot of problems:
- bugs
- instability of previous core features
- Â Sporadic updates
- Inability to migrate by importing previous version designs
- Unresponsive support
It was very difficult when I decided that the Headway theme I was using had to be replaced. It has taken me a couple of years to find a suitable replacement partly because it has taken other themes that long develop design customization capabilities comparable to what I had with Headway so long ago. Even today with a new state of the art theme I have had to combine several plugins and deal with a lot of extra complexity in designing the theme and deploying it to multiple websites. Out of the ashes of the Headway theme other companies like Blox Theme and Padma Unlimited have picked up the pieces from the code. Blox Theme has a licensing payment model while Padma unlimited is a free framework with options for paid support. I am continuing to monitor these developments but it is time to move on and keep moving forward.
Finally, I have come out of the other side in dealing with these theme design issues and along the way, a lot has changed for the better. It is time to showcase these changes and get back to blogging again. There is a lot that needs to be said.