Still No Wood Grain: WP Tavern Design Update

WP Tavern homepage design.

It has been a bit of a slow news week in the land of WordPress with the COVID-19 pandemic reaching across the globe. Most people are hunkering down or getting accustomed to a change in their daily lives. For some people, that has meant figuring out a way to work with children at home. For others, it has meant they cannot take their daily lunch with colleagues or friends.

With far less WordPress-specific news going on, it made for an ideal time to put some work into the WP Tavern website. Most weeks, I am far too busy sifting through stories to put the amount of work I want into updating the design, but I am trying to treat this week as a little bit of a blessing and look at the upside.

Not much has changed with the overall layout of the site, but I was able to tackle a couple of issues that you, our readers, have been asking for.

The biggest change that you will notice is a new header design. On mobile devices, it will look the same. However, on larger screens, the header expands to reveal a search form with a navigation menu below. The header colors have been updated. With more horizontal space, the menu also has extra links pointing to our primary categories, which has also been an oft-requested change.

While these changes may seem minor, I wanted to address some of the bigger user-experience issues that you all have messaged about. There is still more work to do, but I want you to know that we are listening to your feedback.

The major roadblock with this design iteration was related to the block editor’s markup changes. These changes will land in WordPress 5.4, so theme authors need to make sure they are prepared.

I wanted to spend more time working on front-end updates, but correcting editor issues took precedence. It has not been a great experience writing on the site for the past week without theme styles being properly applied. The block editor’s default font size is far too small for my poor eyesight, so backend work moved to the top of the to-do list.

Aside from those changes, I cleaned up several trivial issues that have been bugging me but would go unnoticed by visitors. Work on a website design is never finished, and I look forward to continuing molding things to better serve our readers.

One of the things I want to tackle next is featuring comments from you all in better ways. We have done a little of this with our From the Comments series, but that is just the first step toward building more of a community atmosphere. As always, feedback is welcome.

Everyone stay safe during this rough patch the world is going through.