If you’re reading this, then I’m afraid to tell you that it has all gone off without a hitch and the great blog migration of 2026 has been completed successfully. We’re now live on a new host, in a new country, on a new continent, and with a fresh coat of paint to boot.
I’ve never been particularly fussy about my theme here. While I’ve definitely had preferences, and have never shied away from moving something around, or changing something here and there, I’ve never been particularly bothered about anything overall. Despite a number of theme changes over the years, Show Off by WooThemes has been a fine theme that I’ve been happy with for many years. But we’ve had Show Off for a long time now, and for a few years, I’ve had a few ideas about what my blog would look like, if it was something I had to design “from scratch”. But hold onto that thought, because we’ll come back to this.
Email receipts show I purchased Show Off from WooThemes in November 2013. How soon I implemented it after that is a mystery; a post from October says I updated some post visuals, but there’s no posts around that time that indicate I changed themes entirely, at least not in the same way that there were the previous times this happened. Which, surprisingly, turned out to be quite a few times in the first few years’ of this blog’s infancy. Let’s chalk the rapid change of theme to the rapid pace of change of the web at the time, my own changing preferences as I learned about what I wanted and what I didn’t, and probably a little too much time on my hands. How else would I have gone looking for WordPress themes? Where there’s lots of low-quality themes, outright scams where you might download some malware instead of a theme ZIP file, and all of that is before getting to designs I actually like? Anyway, for all I know I could have sat on Show Off for the better part of a year, and only made the switch around the time I changed from shared Australian hosting to a VPS in New York from Digital Ocean, where my blog has happily been served for over a decade now. But we’ll come back to this, too.
And while I’ve never really hated the current theme, I’ve never really loved it, either. It’s been firmly ensconced within “acceptably OK” territory all this time. Framework themes are a bit like that. They’re over-engineered to cater for a wide variety of layouts and tastes and styles and personal preferences, but at the same time, lack the kinds of personal flairs that make a personal blog, well, personal. I’ve never needed WooCommerce compatibility, nor a fraction of as many plugins as they offered at the time. I enjoyed the flexibility of being able to customise the theme to my liking, and based on screenshots of the original theme I did exactly that, but even then, that was a one-and-done thing to setup the look and feel until I had something that I was happy with, not something that I continually re-visited on an ongoing basis. And now that I’ve been there and done that, all that flexibility is just extra baggage. Useful and necessary, at the outset, but now just something you’ve been dragging around on your journey when you could have had something more sleek and lightweight.
And as the years have rolled by, and both cosmetic and technical baggage has accumulated, the time has come to swap themes yet again.
But to what? Another framework theme seems ill-advised, given what we’ve just covered. Besides, it’s 2026, are there even WordPress theme shops in this day and age? Surprisingly yes, and I even think Elegant Themes were selling Divi over a decade ago, but that still doesn’t make them a good option. I don’t care how many times “performance” is mentioned as a selling point, the fact that it’s mentioned in the first place is a dead giveaway that maybe the theme isn’t as performant as it could be. But like I said, that comes with the territory when it comes to all-in-one framework themes.
Clearly, the best option is to do what I’ve always wanted to do, and design my own theme from scratch. Paid themes might come with customisability advantages, but that’s only because they’re the jack-of-all-trades, master-of-none option. If I design my own theme from scratch, and include the features and layout that I want, then isn’t that the better deal overall? Where I won’t need to spend a bunch of time customising the theme to my own liking, and can instead spend that time fixing other issues along the way?
But if I am going to design my own theme, I don’t want to design something only for the current flavour of the month to change. That means Liquid Glass is out, despite how technically impressive and cool it is. Or uncool, depending on what you think of the latest iOS and macOS releases. The Okta app’s recent rounded redesign is exactly the kind of thing I want to avoid. I don’t think it looks bad, in fact it’s much more aligned to the overall design language of iOS 26 and 27, but what’s it going to look like in 5, 6, 7 or 8 years when design language changes again, and there are new paradigms to incorporate into our designs? I don’t think overly-textured, reality-mirroring skeuomorphic design was necessarily a net positive for design, but neither were the flat, lifeless landscapes that replaced it. Like all things, maybe the answer was a bit of both, which seems to be what we’re moving back towards. If I want to design my own theme, it has to have a textured background, a slightly raised reading surface, dark mode, and be responsive so it looks good no matter what device you’re reading on. It’s 2026, for crying out loud, and my current theme doesn’t even support dark mode. I know changing designs isn’t a big deal, but look at Instagram’s new font. It’s… wild. Maybe that’s 2026 for you.
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