As regular visitors already noticed, Onahole Review switched to a new blog design 🙂

Onahole Review has been using the same theme for years, as far as end 2012 when it left the wordpress.com platform and became self-hosted.

Using the same framework for 5 years meant I was able to adapt it to my needs, customizing it’s appearance, and gradually tweaking more and more deeply in it’s source code. Feel free to browse the Internet Archive Wayback Machine to see how it evolved over the time 😉

But eventually, mobile devices became a challenge for web design UX, and some functions can’t be properly used (hover-menus, width fitting, …) and overall my tweaks were quite a hassle to port when the theme was updated.

Nevertheless, 5 years is an eternity in the web history. Many thanks to Elmastudio for having created the Yoko theme !

Going forward, I tested out a few themes with similar layout (header with menu, right sidebar in 1:3 size, footer) and who particularly well adapted to mobile devices. Eventually, I came up with Type by Design Lab, and beta-tested it with AnonymousD.

I appreciate this theme for it’s clean base, it’s “responsivity”, it’s hybrid approach for the menu (hover expanding header menu for desktop, “burger” type menu for mobile), it’s smart placement of the search function (next to menu on desktop, top right of screen on mobile), a well delimited footer area, and the easy ability to use custom CSS (of which I still have 20 lines to streamline things like the popular posts widget, the Overview page, the shop links, adding a shadow to the site title..).

Over time we will be sharpening some details, smoothing out a few pages, using a new banner,…  we’ll keep customizing the menus and widgets to keep browsing intuitive, for newcomers and regular visitors alike 🙂

Enjoy !