I started out with this blog just under two years ago. I didn’t have much idea about blogging or WordPress, I just had an old blog site I’d ignored for years. I only re-discovered it because when I tried to create a new site with WordPress.com, in 2024, they told me I already had one! So having found my site I wrote some initial blogs. I enjoyed that so I signed up to wordpress.com and took out a personal account with them.
The wordpress software and creating themes etc was totally alien to me. I’d seen sites I liked the look of but couldn’t create anything like them with the themes built into the wordpress personal package. I built a basic site that was clean and easy to get around and spent a little bit of time learning how to create posts and use tags etc to get my blogs out into the world.
As times gone by I’ve become a bit frustrated with my basic site so I decided it was time to do something about it. To move on I needed to get full access to plugins but that was tightly restricted with the WordPress.com personal account. If I wanted to stay with wordpress.com and get the plugins I wanted I would have to upgrade to their Buisness Package, expensive for my needs at $300.
I shopped around and decided to move my hosting to Fasthosts, a UK company. They have been hosting my email server for a long time so I decided to bring that and wordpress hosting together into one package. Their business plan is £11.99 a month (£0.99p a month for the first year), giving me unrestricted access to plugins and incorporates my email which I no longer have to pay for, saving me £40 a year.
Having put that in place, a week ago. I then had decide on a new theme for my new WP blog. I’ve been looking around at WP theme packages for some time and I whittled my choices down to two. One was the Liquid Web Kadence Theme and the other was TagDev Newspaper Theme.
I like both themes but after some research I decided the TagDev theme was more suited to what I wanted my site to look like. I’d first seen the Newspaper Theme on the Macfilos photography website (image above) and I really liked their blog section layout. The layout they use is a module within the Newspaper Theme so I thought I could start there and customise it for my needs.
So, I bought the theme, installed it on my new WP account and opened up the editing software. What a nightmare. I tried following a YouTube video on setting up a new site which sort of helped but having spent a whole evening trying to install the module I wanted, I got nowhere. The following day I did end up with a new basic home page with a menu and a few frames in the middle. Over the next few days I realised that I needed to take my time, follow some guidance on the TagDev site or research using Goole AI, and slowly but surely I made progress.
Today is five days on from my initial efforts to create my site and I’m now really enjoying using the theme software. It’s very powerful and provides endless ways to design the site you want. That’s what makes it difficult at first but ultimately, for me, it’s proving to be a real joy. I’m glad now that I didn’t install the module. I’ve used the built in theme templates to build the site I now have.
I pretty much now have my new blog site looking the way I want it. The other issues were moving my domain name over and migrating all my data from the old site to the new host. Fasthosts offered to do this for me but there was a five week wait for that service. Moving the domain name was easy and it turned out that migrating my old posts was also pretty straightforward.
You can use plugins to migrate everything for you but they work best on a fresh clean WP install. My new WP install had a weeks worth of work setting up the new theme so I didn’t want to take that option. I decided I only wanted the posts and media files from my old blog so I used the built in WP Export and Import function in the WP Dashboard.
That worked well for the posts. They all transferred over correctly with their embedded images and comments etc. It was a mixed bag with the media files. Some came over but not all. However the posts are not missing any images so I’m not too bothered about that.
They new site is looking just the way I wanted it to look and I’m really enjoying tinkering with the theme software. I think there may be a conflict with JetPack as my tags are not appearing in the JetPack Reader. My posts seem to pop up in the ‘Recents’ feed but I’ve not been able to resolve the tag issue. Annoying as I have a new Lens-Artist post that no one is seeing.
The domain transfer is still working it’s way through but in the meantime the new site can be viewed here stevehyde.me.uk I’m open to any constructive feedback or ideas anybody might have for the site.
All images: ©Stephen Hyde 2007-2026 – All rights reserved.
Nice clean look, Steve. I look forward to dipping in to it later. If I have a comment it’s that I generally prefer to have a darker background for photography, and I wonder if your theme is light/dark responsive? I’ve not looked hard enough myself yet, and perhaps it’s obvious.
Hi Bish, thank you for taking the time to comment. That’s a very good point and something I’d not considered. I’ll delve into the theme settings later and see if there’s an option in relation to light/dark mode, Steve