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Site Style & Readability

I’ve been playing around with my site design a bit, exploring different Google Font combinations and I think I’ve found one that I really like in terms of overall front-end style and readability but also with regards to backend writing.

I’m decided upon Lora for the body and Lato for the headings.

To apply this to my WordPress Twenty Twenty theme, I’ve added the amazing Twentig plug-in and then when customizing my site, I’ve chosen Twentig Options > Fonts then under Body I’ve set it to “Lora / Medium / Medium” (i.e. font / size / line height) and under Headings I’ve set it to “Lato / Black 900 / Tight / Larger.” I also had to set the Site Title Font Weight to “Black 900” under Site Title as well.

All said and done, I’m absolutely loving the look and feel of my single page layouts in WordPress now.

Next thing to tackle though is how my listing of posts are shown. Currently under Twentig Options > Blog, I’ve set the Blog Layout to “Stack” (which causes the post title and meta details to be tucked in tighter compared to the single page layout format).

While I may set the Blog Layout back to “Default,” I still want some way of visually differentiating long form posts from short form (micro) posts somehow, potentially even rearranging long form posts first and short form posts afterwards on listing pages (using either CSS or JQuery if need be).

Finally, while I’d also love to dive into full site editing with the Twenty Twenty Twotheme, the user interface design and usability of it is just no where near it needs to be. It’s highly convoluted and confusing, especially compared to Squarespace’s interface. In fact, I actually find the old Version 5 of Squarespace to be much more powerful and easier to use, since you activated different focused modes (i.e. Content, Structure, Style, Preview) to work on your site.

So in Style mode in Squarespace Version 5, you could only stylize elements but the interface was way more powerful, yet simpler to use than the style interface in WordPress. That’s the primary problem with the WordPress full site editing interface today, figuring out the context of what you’re working on is extremely confusing and frustrating. However, once they do figure this out, WordPress will finally surpass Squarespace in both power and usability which is amazing considering where WordPress was a decade ago.

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