Surprises Come In Many Forms
This morning I received another surprise. I would like to say it was a pleasant one but regrettably that was not the case. In fact I was flabbergasted this morning when I logged into my affiliate marketing site. If it wasn’t for recognizing the name of this site, I wouldn’t have known it was mine.
I’ve lost count of the number of days this website was offline due to requiring a new theme.
As mentioned in previous posts, I had difficulty with a theme I purchased. I then purchased another theme. This time I chose a Studio Press theme believing it would be reliable.
Reliability of this theme in terms of SEO performance, I cannot yet comment on. However, what I can say is this theme was difficult to design to my requirements.
However, I persisted and eventually reached a stage where I sufficiently satisfied to publish the site so I could get back into action with creating content.
Before telling the next stage of this story, I emphasize my close attention given to saving and publishing each stage as I worked through the process of getting this theme to my liking.
This morning, I cheerfully logged into my website. Shock – horror - much of my designing has gone.
The header is now the colour black. When it was published last night, the header was blue.
Text colours are different to what I chose.
Regarding the header, I had given close attention to a shade of blue. This may sound to be easy but that was not so. What made it rather difficult was not being able to change the colour of the menu. Maybe it is called ‘hover’ menu but I would call ‘background menu’ and I could not change it. So a lot of time was spent on that.
The site now has a left-side menu. I had set is as a right-side menu.
Yes, I can put it all back, but what’s the use of spending time reformatting when I have no guarantee it will not revert again.
And a crazy thing is that the footer is still blue. The same colour as the header should have been this morning when I logged on.
I could have been paid the compliment of changing the footer to black to match the header!
Am I discouraged? Absolutely!
Why ever did Wow Themes stop supporting their wonderful Canvas theme? Working with Canvas was like working Cloud Nine. I thought GeneratePress would be a good alternative to Canvas, but that was not the case.
I'll attempt to write my next post about something cheerful!
Recent Comments
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Hi Valerie, you have been in the wars, the release of Gutenburg has exposed some compatibility issues, especially with themes and plugins that have not been supported for some time.
It can be so frustrating trying to update a site.
I see that you have ended up with Studio Press, there is an excellent tutorial on Youtube that may be useful along with the theme based tutorials. When I say good, I mean easy to follow,
From memory search for
How to Customize Any StudioPress Theme - Genesis Framework Tutorial.
Best wishes for, getting sorted.
Thanks, Alex. I'll give that a try. I really am getting desperate with this and wondering why I'm here.
I contacted site support and they told me it was fixed. But it's not fixed. My site still comes up black. I've cleared cache and rebooted my computer. I've gone on incognito. It still comes up black. I've been working on this for more than a week and getting nothing else done.
I'll go take a look at that Youtube video now.
Thanks again :)
Hi Valerie, try not to despair, something will work, it is hard to totally break something and usually, it can be something that we have overlooked. there are quite a few incompatibility issues at the moment.
Try going to the way back machine and checking when your site changed, there will be something that caused this from here try to see what you did around the time your site went into free fall.
http://web.archive.org
Just input the name of your site
Hang tight a solution will arrive.
Thanks very much Alex for the amazing help you gave me yesterday. This morning this site was looking good. So, now I can get started on tweaking here and there which is no problem.
That is awesome Valerie, you were going through some angst, you will be so pleased that you can now get back to developing your site.
That is the worst possible thing to happen.
Like you, I like my sites to look "just so" and can spend hours making adjustments.
I once lost hours of work when I went off to make tea or something and my computer decided to snooze!! Grrrr ...
That taught me a very valuable lesson to "save" changes constantly and often.
Does your theme not have a "recent reviews" option that you can recover from where you were last night?
I think Generate Press does have this ability.
Good luck
Thanks very much, Lawrence. It was interesting reading about your unpleasant experience with your website, and what you learned from it.
The problem I had yesterday was due to anything I had done. The site was saved and supposedly secure when I logged off the night before, but yesterday, it opened as something quite different to what I had created.
Anyway, after hours of agony, the site was up and running about 10 pm last night.
Sorry to hear about your theme challenges, Val. One of the times I had to change themes was when I had updated a theme I liked and had it set up the way I wanted it. The update ran the blogroll down the left side of my homepage, left me with other challenges, and no real support. So I had to switch themes. Later I had to switch themes again. Theme challenges are no fun. I hope you find a good theme that does what you desire so you can move forward. :)
Colleen
Hi Colleen, thanks so much for your message and sorry to learn you've experienced theme difficulties, too. Not nice.
My theme actually broke before it improved. Site Support fixed it in the end but it was a long and laborious task, not to mention nerve-wracking!
At this point, I'm revamping my site ideas and possibilities. I'm not looking forward to switching themes, but probably will do so soon. Sounds like you're getting things resolved, but that kind of adventure is not fun.
It certainly is not fun, Colleen.
I do hope your switching themes goes well for you.
It's amazing how the advance in some technology intended to improve things, no doubt, proves to be exactly the opposite.
I remember during 2010 - 2011 changing themes at least twice and without any bother. Move on approximately 10 years and experience the difficulties of complexity!
Thank you! So true about the complexity of things, Valerie! Wonder what it will be like in another 10 years.
Thanks for the heads up Val, at least now I know to steer away from this theme. Hope you will be able to find a solution.
If I have to buy a theme I would have it from WordPress on my back office. It's easy to manage and trace the issue and I have all the advantage because it is a part of my web host services.
Jimmy, the theme I use is a WordPress theme and it's installed on my back office. And, no doubt, this is part of my web host service, but I don't believe those people are into managing the design of a theme.
Thanks for your comment.
I wonder why you have encountered those issues. Nevertheless, the back up in WA is still the resource if you cannot fix it you just ask that they will restore your website to the best last situation where you were in.
Thanks, Jimmy, for your comment.
It turned out to be a nightmare, and it took Site Support several attempts to fix the problem.
However, it is fixed now :)
Wow...what an odd thing to have happen. After your fix it all up again, back it up just in case. That said, make sure you don't have any extra accounts or some sort of back end access thing happening where someone's messing with you.
Thanks for your message, Scott. I certainly should not have any back end interference as I work alone on my websites.
It's a mystery, and probably will remain that way.
Cheers :)
Years ago, I had a theme I loved. It was the "look" I wanted with the right colors, etc. Unfortunately, the developer stopped updating and supporting the theme. One day right after one of the WordPress updates, the theme stopped working. The only thing that showed up was a white page. No images, no header, no text. Just white.
I never found another theme that looked like the one I had. So I eventually decided to go with a premium theme knowing the company would continue supporting it.
It's very disappointing when a theme is no longer supported, and I understand how it was for you with that theme you liked so much, Glen.
In my case, I have always worked with Premium themes, right from the very first theme I used.
Woo Canvas, which I referred to in my post, was a Premium theme. But, Woo stopped supporting it about 2 years ago. I had a similar experience to yours when I updated another of my websites on Canvas. The update was not the theme, but it was a WordPress update that caused the theme to fail.
These days there are so many themes that look great, but getting the appearance we want is not easy.
Thanks, Glen. I appreciate your comment.
Gee, I don't blame you for being discouraged. I have considered changing themes, but am afraid to do it...I don't want to run into the kind of problems you are having. Hope you get it worked out.
Thanks very much, Fran. If your theme is working for you I recommend staying with it. When I first started working online, prior to the Canvas theme I mentioned, the themes I used functioned without any problem. Regrettably, those days are long gone!
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Sorry to hear about the troubles. I hope you get it all worked out.
Thanks very much, Mick.
The problem did get solved late yesterday.
I appreciate your message :)