A personal project

I like to run a few personal websites and really enjoy writing articles for these. The articles are not about web-related technical stuff but describe things I get up to in my spare time. I guess this is a bit of a ‘diversion’ for me and one way to get away from my 9-to-5 job as a freelance web developer/designer.

One of these websites is Clive Goes Cycling where I write a few articles about cycling and mountain biking. For example, in the most recent article, I describe Cycling Devon Coast to Coast which is a route that I cycled with some friends a couple of weekends ago.

When I started the Clive Goes Cycling site, I wanted to spend most of my time writing articles rather than wrangling with the HTML or the CSS so I chose WordPress for the CMS behind the site. That’s not to say that there is no work required with WordPress to make it do what you want but it does provide a fairly advanced starting point for any site.

For Clive Goes Cycling, I started with the Genesis framework from StudioPress because I knew it well. Initially, I chose a theme that I liked and thought would work. It didn’t! It just wasn’t right for the site that I had in mind. After a few articles, I soon realised that I needed a more magazine-style theme. So, I wrote down a few notes about what I wanted (should’ve done that more thoroughly the first time!) and browsed some of the other StudioPress themes. It soon became apparent that the Lifestyle theme was closer to my requirements. So, that’s what I did. It was easy to swap themes and with a few minor alterations in image sizes, everything worked great!

The thing that I like most about this theme is the flexible home page layout. It’s incredibly easy to change the featured image post, the order of other posts, and to write a blog (shorter articles) that are not the main focus of the home page. That’s what I wanted!

All in all, I’m very happy with how Clive Goes Cycling has turned out.