When did simple become horribly complex? (Website theme query)

June 3, 2020 3:50 PM

I need to update my 15-year-old site/blog to make it responsive to tablets and mobiles. And I must work with a Word Press theme to aid in the process of migrating my old WP site. But all of the options I've explored are the exact opposite of what I want (and require).

I'm trying to find something old school, where the landing page would look something like this page from the Paris Review's site. Or the theme's code could be tweaked to mimic that layout by the tech guy who is doing this for me.)

But all of the themes I've explored are glutted behemoths: Crowded landing pages with rotating headers, myriad image positions on the page, sidebars crammed with crap, Google maps worked into the footer and scores of social media icons floating left-right and top to bottom. The 'more is better' approach dominates everywhere I look.

And never mind my encroaching brain death from exposure to millions of stock photo images used to populate sample themes.

Does anyone in the hive have any recommendations for a clean, minimal, kind of old-school -- but still responsive -- theme I might explore?

posted by zenpop to Computers & Internet (8 answers total)

I found Twenty Twenty to be quite clean. I'm sure you can add widgets to add things to it but by default there isn't a lot there. The default themes (the ones named twenty _____ based on the year they were released) in general seem to be pretty good at letting you add or remove stuff as you see fit.
posted by any portmanteau in a storm at 4:27 PM on June 3, 2020

Have you considered just updating your existing theme to be responsive? That might not be easier, but you may end up with something that looks much more like what you want.

Alternatively, start with nothing and then build up. When I was last redesigning my sites, I found 58 bytes of css to look great nearly everywhere and This is a motherfucking website. to be hugely inspirational.
posted by genehack at 4:33 PM on June 3, 2020

Magpaper, Savona Bold/Savona Light, Newspaperist, Elan, Aari, Elizama, Gute Plus... some of these might fit the bill.
posted by xo at 5:12 PM on June 3, 2020

I came to mention motherfuckingwebsite but genehack beat me to it. But there's also bettermotherfuckingwebsite which manages to look a lot better with only a little css.

Plain html and a little css are really all you need most of the time.
posted by suetanvil at 5:14 PM on June 3, 2020

There's more going on behind the scenes on that Paris Review page that you might realize. And a lot of the overly complicated themes you're talking about are using features to show off that you don't necessarily need to use yourself.

All that said, here's a minimal theme by the developer of the theme the Paris Review (which is Wordpress-based) is using. This is not great in terms of responsive design (IMO), but you can hack on it.
posted by adamrice at 7:42 AM on June 4, 2020

The Genesis framework from StudioPress, plus one of its basic themes like Magazine, might work for you if you don't mind paying US$99.95 for the framework plus theme combo.
posted by maudlin at 7:58 AM on June 4, 2020

I was going to recommend Genesis + Magazine Pro, which looks strikingly like the Paris Review homepage, especially if you customize it a little. (New fonts, remove the thick black boxes everywhere, etc.)
posted by nosila at 8:12 AM on June 4, 2020

Thanks folks -- the Genesis and Magazine Pro theme hits the sweet spot. Perfect. Does anyone here use that theme so I might see it live?
posted by zenpop at 4:48 PM on June 5, 2020