About a month ago, I made a big change to this website when I redesigned it and combined the blog with my business website, with both on the same single domain.

At the time, I talked up my strong feeling about a minimalist approach to a presence on the social web, doing away with all the clutter that tends to populate so many websites with widgets, ads, popups galore, and more.

If you observed that change and have visited this site since then, you’ll notice another change if you’re reading this on the site itself rather than via the RSS feed or syndication elsewhere.

I’ve reverted to a website based on the Genesis Framework – in my view, the best foundation for self-hosted WordPress sites – with the eleven40 Pro child theme presenting the content you see and enabling you to interact with it on whatever device you use to come visiting. It’s HTML5 and mobile-responsive.

Why the change?

In short, Decode, the minimalist theme I switched to, presented a number of challenges that I couldn’t resolve without either getting to know more about PHP coding and CSS than I was able to commit time to, or hiring an expert.

There was a major issue surrounding how the site worked on mobile devices. I was hearing about odd experiences some people had reported where browsers on iPhones and iPads crashed when trying to load content from the site.

To fix that in the short term, I installed the WPtouch mobile theme, which did the trick. It’s a great addition to any WordPress site but not what I wanted as it needed more work that I was willing to give time to to make it behave consistently with the primary look-and-feel of the Decode theme.

I’d also experienced some weirdness with sudden changes in formatting to content after it had been published.

I’m highly confident that none of those issues will arise with the Genesis Framework-based foundation now in place.

In preparing this site today for relaunch, I was greatly aided by using a terrific tool called Design Palette Pro, a premium WordPress plugin designed to work with Genesis that lets you customize many appearance elements of a Genesis child theme without having to edit any code.

So here is version 6 of NevilleHobson.com! Hope it works for you – let me know if it does or not.