Took me a long time, but I finally found a decent WordPress theme: The 2011 WordPress themes I used many years ago!

I had stopped using it because I thought it was unmaintained, but I recently found out that all the default WordPress themes are in fact still maintained.

The theme that I used previously was just a temporary solution as the one I had in use was unmaintained and I had just had to replace it. I had never been happy with it, but also not found anything simple to replace it.

Nowadays WordPress themes use up a lot of screen space, so it is somewhat difficult to find the article, as it is almost entirely hidden behind a need to scroll down:

How this very blog would look with the Twenty TwentyFour theme (and some placeholder text).

This is just bad design. A blog is a place to post articles. If you cannot find the articles because a lot of fancy graphics hides your articles away, well… Not how a blog should look like.

This is the Twenty TwentyTwo theme. You can just about make out a headline in the area where the text should start

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The Twenty Fifteen theme does a much better job at being WordPress theme.

The Twenty Twelve theme does a very good job being a theme, it makes things easy to find. It is obvious how to use this website.

And finally the Twenty Eleven theme, which as of writing this article, is the theme that I use. It looks pretty much exactly like the theme from 2010, but adapts to screen sizes such those in phones.

The links to the pages are highlighted using a black bar and are immediately obvious. The search bar is easy to find — in fact, there are two, as I forgot to turn one off — in exactly the way the side bar makes it easy to place links, like those to RSS feeds and Atom feeds, to categories or other websites. I also use this space to explain my cookie policy:

This site doesn’t use cookies.

Of course that is not true for myself, as that is required for logins to work, but only for me and few guest authors cookies are used.

I absolutely enjoy looking at this theme. It is very simple and does exactly what it was made to do and still is perfect at fulfilling its raison d’être 13 years later.

Why annoy users with stuff they do not need nor want instead of making websites easy to use?