How often will you change your theme in the timespan of your website? When I chose my first theme, Michael Hyatt’s Get Noticed!, I thought naively it would be there forever. As it turned out, the theme was discontinued only months later when Michael’s business took on a new direction.
The thing is, I really liked that theme. It had a simple layout and was easy to use, but included all the features I was likely to want. Replacing it, at that early stage when I had hardly a clue about what I was doing, was stressful to put it mildly. With advice from Michael’s team however, I discovered Jeff Goins’ Tribe, a creation of Notable Themes just as my first theme had been.
Like Get Noticed!, Tribe was simple but opened up all kinds of creative possibilities, none of which required me to write a line of code. In fact, I’m quite sure Jeff Goins wouldn’t like what I did with it at all, since he likes to focus on the written word without a lot of visual distraction. While I am absolutely serious about the message of Anselm’s Quest, I also want to have fun with the visuals, a result of my life as an artist as well as a writer. I want my site to look handmade, without the slick, technical gloss that makes so many websites look alike.
Yet a creative life abhors the vacuum that results from too much comfort. The first inkling I had about impending change arrived with an email a while ago. It said the old Tribe theme was being discontinued and there was now Tribe2. I could continue to use the original Tribe, but it would not be updated. What did that mean exactly? Perhaps it was like the WordPress platform, where you could continue to use the original classic editor instead of the new Gutenberg.
It didn’t take long to realize that using the old theme was was a futureless proposition. Such are the limits of legacy software. The first shock came when I tried to insert an image into my August post. I couldn’t upload the image or access the media library. A hasty query to my web host’s incomparable support team at Pair Networks yielded the following advice:
I have seen similar reported issues over the last month, and the issue almost always is a result of using a theme which is older and not fully compatible with PHP 7.4 and WordPress 5.5 (the current versions).
There it was. I was going to have to switch to Tribe2 willy nilly. Of course I could find a different theme altogether, but it’s hard to beat Notable Themes. Comparing them to others is like comparing a solid state computer drive to a traditional hard drive. In software terms, it offers a richness of result with an economy of means, a good measuring stick for any tool.
Tribe2 incorporates everything I could want in my website. It doesn’t require me to code or add a lot of plugins to customize it to my taste. Yes, it costs me more, but it also gives me ongoing support, which the old pricing setup didn’t. And, to offset the inconvenience of losing my old theme, Notable Themes gave me a super discount for being a legacy customer.
I expect Tribe2 will also satisfy my liking for creative subversion just as the old Tribe did. Sadly, I expect the sidebar to disappear, replaced by widgetized pages. That sidebar was what attracted me to both Get Noticed! and Tribe. It was a security blanket of sorts. However, now there’s an opportunity to explore new ideas and I’m ready for that.
Since signing on for Tribe2 I’ve finished copying everything I need to finish a hard copy archive of the site as well as to restore files if need be. The next move is to install the new theme, but without knowing what effect it will have on the website. Well, if in the first week of October things suddenly look very different or not as you think they should, please be patient. Eventually it will all work itself out.
Have you had to choose or change a theme? What did you want your new theme to do and how did you find it? You’re welcome to leave a comment on this post below. The comments policy for this website is near the bottom of the Nuts & Bolts page.