I’m launching an upgrade to my website theme tonight, which could mean the site is offline for an hour while I replace the files and update my database. The general look and feel of the site will be the same, but Ive made a few changes under the hood that should mark a noticeable improvement on the site.

Whats the point? Well, the original site design was a quick one. Being a relative novice to wordpress at the time, I never designed the theme with optimization in mind. As a result, the upgrade should knock around 100kb off the page load (depending on which page you’re visiting). On top of this, Ive chosen to use K2 as a template, which has allowed me to eaily integrate AJAX functionality into a number of different areas. Most noticeable will be the comments system, with an AJAX style search following in the next few days.

Its also allowed me to use my newly found O.C.D. style of CSS design to tidy things up from that perspective! Ok, Im not that bad – but up to now its wound me up a bit to look at the mess that is my stylesheet and know that I just need to put an evening aside and I could praobably knock it to half its size – and I wasn’t far wrong. At time of writing this, my current stylesheet is around 2800 lines long, with my upgrade stylesheet currently sitting at around 1300 (admittedly, with a little more work to do). The actual file size difference is slightly more negligible, but I’m finding it a lot easier to find selectors and it just generally looks neater. For me, single line CSS is the way forward!

Ive also tidied up a few of my plugins, fixed the contact page (which I think I managed to break when I set up Google Apps for Domains), and a few other display bugs Ive come across in the last few weeks.

All in all, Ive done this to stop myself from hacking away from it at a regular basis. By listing all the things I didn’t like and committing to fix them in a weekend, I should be able to concentrate my evenings on something more productive. Learning ASP.NET is top of my list at the moment, alongside a few other ideas for side projects Ive had over the last few months.

So all I have to do now is hope the upgrade goes without a hitch…! If I’m still offline tomorrow morning then… <sigh> Pray for me!!</sigh>