Well, brilliant timing for our WordPress Video Series which was very recently completed (well, the first bit of it which is the Free Fast Track Video Series, in which I’m showing you how to build you own professionally looking website using WordPress in no time).
The Free Fast Track Video Series was recorded and shows the how to instructions using the Twenty Eleven theme and now – of course – just weeks later, the new theme Twenty Twelve is out.
I’m under the impression that the user might as well go for the newest theme available at any one time (unless we are talking themes or programs that often come with bugs in the beginning), so in other words it means that the Free Fast Track Video Series is now all with an older theme than the current theme.
But fear not. I’m making additional Bonus videos that will pick up on the new theme and the changes and how get where you got with the original instructions – so you should be in good hands.
By the looks of it most things and most of the instructions would be identical for the two themes. As an example he instructions for how to post and publish a page is unchanged. Same for a post. Same for most things.
In fact the biggest change there could be said to have been made for the new theme is the removal of the automatically present and fairly large header image. In addition to that the changes that I have noticed so far is a move of the navigation bar further up on the which would place it above an header image that you could still place into the site.
Additionally, the color scheme has changed a little, so that the feel of it is almost all grey. A headline for a page is blue (used to be a charcoal blackish), but all the links are now grey, where the used to be blue. However, hover over the links and they turn blue, where before when you hovered over them they would show an underline (now links are continuously underlined).
These are not dramatic changes and I guess ultimately it’s just a matter of individual tastes. Personally, without having filled in a bunch of images and other boxes including some colors, can give the new theme a bit of a “boring” subdued feel, since it shows mostly grey.
This may though get way better looking once you start populating your site so not a big deal.
What I’m missing with the Twenty Twelve theme that Twenty Eleven had, is the quick ability to change the link colors (i.e. without the need to go into the Editor and changing codes in the CSS codes – remember, I’m striving to make the instructions for this website and How Tos to be a little technical as possible).
Another change is a slightly narrowing of the page from 1000 pixels to 960 pixels. Any header image is also made slightly smaller to be now 960 pixels by 250 pixels, from previously 1000 pixels by 288 pixels.
A slightly smaller header, especially with respect to its height is not a bad thing for it will make more of your page stay above the fold which can be very important. If you are uncertain what that means then I’m referring to the fact that more of your page will be shown on your screen when you open up the website without you having to scroll down.
As we are all impatient online and quickly will zoom off to something else unless something draws us into your website quickly, this is important!
Now the Header image will have padding at each end of the image so that it will now not fill out the width of the page. I kinda liked it more before in the Twenty Eleven theme, but its probably not a big thing in the end. Yes, you can more than likely fix this along with everything else, but I like to be able to choose my setup as much as possible from the get go without changing codes. This website again tries to limit the need for anything too technical – so I strive to mess with codes as little as possible.
So in continuance of this, wouldn’t have been great if there were built in quick options for choosing whether to have padding or not, where to place your navigation bar and changing of color schemes?
The final change is the fact that the Twenty Twelve has abandoned the footer area where in Twenty Eleven you had 3 footer areas that you could populate. I’m unhappy with this. Footer areas can be great to utilize and infact I recommend footer usage for several things. So this means that if you wish to utilize the Twenty Twelve theme, you will have to find work around this, unless someone builds a nice plugin that will fix this end.
Yes, you can do much and you can make use of e.g. child theme configurations and then expand the possibilities, but then alas again we are talking more technicalities. I think most private users are NOT looking for too much technical skill needs in their pursuit of building their own website.
So there you have it.
Twenty Twelve, still a great platform and easy content management system, but I do miss some of the parts from Twenty Eleven.
This particular website – https://www.websitecreationmastery.com – will now be updated to the Twenty Twelve theme, which also means that its appearance will change somewhat and that I will need to make a few work arounds to get my footer areas etc.
Instructions on all to follow.
Meanwhile do go and grab yourself the Free Fast Track Video Series and let me know if you found this helpful and useful. As I said I will add update videos to the series that will go into the Twenty Twelve theme changes.
To your great website building success!
(original content posted on previous site on 2013/01/07)
