With a fresh start for Complete Hosting Guide combined with the fact that more people are browsing the website on mobile devices, we felt it was fitting to retheme the website with a more modern and responsive theme.

About the New Theme

We decided to use the Corolla subtheme of AdaptiveTheme as a base, and then started making modification from there. We've made a lot of changes to the CSS, and decided to use our own color scheme instead of one of the default ones.

Then we had to add a bunch of Drupal plugins for some of the new functionality we wanted. For example, we had to install Superfish menus (not to be confused with Suckerfish) to get the menus to look the way we wanted, and the highlight.js plugin to automatically add syntax highlighting to example HTML, CSS and PHP code (i.e. colorize it) to make it look prettier.

The Old Theme is Still Available

We had put so much work into the old theme (called Marinelli), we didn't want to just throw it away. It works great for desktop computers and large tablets, but isn't really suitable for mobile. It is slightly more compact than the new theme, which can be an advantage if you are power user and need to quickly navigate to different parts of the website.

If you are logged in, you can change themes by using the drop down box in the right sidebar.

The Challenges of Responsive & Multiple Themes

One thing we encountered immediately was that our YouTube videos were not adapting to the responsive theme, and looked different on the old and new themes. This is because the YouTube embed code contains a width and a height, and is not responsive.

Well, we did some research on that, and found a way to make the videos responsive. We wrote an article on how we did it, which you can find here:

• How to Embed Responsive Videos

Then we discovered that the ads were not not always conforming to the responsive theme, so we had to modify many of those as well. Luckily Google provides responsive ad units, that automatically resize. For our house ads, on the other hand, we'll have to come up with a more creative solution.

More Changes to Come

Right now we concentrated on the desktop look & feel of the website. The responsive theme still automatically adapts to tablets and mobile, but we have not modified those versions enough to our taste. For example, we are still looking for a suitable way to collapse the menu bars when you are on a mobile device.

I hope you enjoy the new theme, and if you loved the old theme, you can set it as your default once you login.

Have a great day!