Before cracking any code this week, I tried to envision my site as a finished product so I could make a list of all the changes I wanted to make in my child theme. I knew of a few functionality add-ons I wanted to try (anchor links, a floating taskbar, etc.), but I was still fuzzy on the basic look I wanted.

Right now, I’m on a train coming back to D.C. after four days on the beach in Rhode Island. My sister got engaged last week, so our whole family plus significant others spent the weekend talking about possible wedding venues, buffets vs. table service and how to whittle four enormous Italian families (two on the bride’s side, two on the groom’s) down to a guest list of 200.

One of the wedding magazines I brought my sister as an engagement gift featured 10 pages of possible wedding color palettes (apparently each wedding warrants an entire palette unto itself?), and as we browsed through, I came across one that I loved—poppy red, teal and gray. It wasn’t until today, three days later, while working on WordPress on the Amtrak home, that I realized I could use it as my website palette. Word is still out on whether Erica will use it for her big day, too.

I know I want a clean, no-fuss, user-friendly site, so a lot of the changes I made this week were subtractions. I took out an icon that was appearing on every post to designate its type; I removed the footer; I hid all the sidebar widgets that made the bottom of my page look so cluttered. Even though I may decide to add some stuff back in as I flesh out the rest of my site, I like starting from a cleaner slate, and it’s looking a lot more like what I’d envisioned. I’m feeling more confident poking around in the code now that I have my child theme with the parent theme as a sort of backup. My only big frustration was in trying to change the border colors on the little bubbles around my posts—I couldn’t change it in the style sheet no matter how many different ways I tried. Turns out I needed to change it in the admin, and it’s not as customizable as I would have liked. I’m not giving up yet, though! Hack hack hack.