There’s much water under the bridge since I started blogging about photography in 2005. Photography, kids, books, and adventures have all happened in the time that has passed. Katie Rose was born.

If you’ve been with me for a while you’ll know that I haven’t readily changed the look-and-feel of my blog. For me, it is about photography and communicating passion and skills—not about being the latest and greatest.

In fact, until today the appearance stayed the same as in the first post, a Photoshop riff on ducks afloat in a bathtub. This was a fairly generic WordPress blog based on a slightly customized version of the famous (or infamous) Kubrick theme.

No matter that blog posts are now only one of the social mediums, and that one tries to deliver content to people the way they’d like it. My blog stores are reposted in excerpts on my Facebook page, tweeted, syndicated, and available as emails. Think of some other way to deliver this content that would work for you, and I’ll likely sign on.

I also think that I’ve grown and changed as a photographer and author since I started the blog—in ways that are probably the subject of another story—and I wanted a design that reflected these changes.

Anyhow, it was time for a facelift—not only was the old look a bit dated, but also functionally under some viewing conditions the text in my stories wasn’t as legible as I’d have liked it.

Notionally, changing the appearance of a WordPress blog is a matter of swapping themes in and out. So I went looking for a theme. There are plenty of nice photography portfolio themes, and some decent text-oriented themes that a newspaper (for example) might use, but I had real difficulty finding a simple theme that accomodated both my photos and my words. In the end, I chose Carrington Text, and modified it slightly to suit my needs.

Unlike life, changing the theme is retroactive: the skin surrounding my words and photos has been remodeled going all the way back.

I think this simple but elegant design works pretty well. Please let me know what you think!