Two years ago I looked at hundreds of WordPress themes in anticipation of putting up this site. I’d never paid for a theme before, but time and again I kept coming back to the themes at StudioPress.com. Their designs were clean, their support seemed solid, and after a while I decided to pull the trigger on their Streamline theme, which is the theme you see on this site.
For a year and a half I was perfectly satisfied. The support was excellent, the theme performed as expected, and I was able to get on with the business of blogging.
About six months ago, however — give or take — StudioPress became a subsidiary of CopyBlogger, the underlying software for the themes was radically altered, and the support on the site became spottier and more contentious. I never faulted the moderators for putting limits on the amount of customization they offered, but the tone and frequency of such reprimands seemed to signal an intent to drive additional fee-for-service revenue from the basic themes being sold.
Because I knew upgrading my current theme would break a number of modifications I’d made, I put off the upgrade as long as possible. At the same time I faced an ever-growing backlog of changes I wanted to make on my site, and at some point it became obvious that I should upgrade before making any additional changes to an older version I had every intention of migrating away from. [ Read more ]