I re-designed No CS Degree

No CS Degree now has dark mode, looks great on mobile and shows you how far through an article you are. I used the Liebling theme from the Ghost marketplace.

I had been meaning to change the theme for about 6 months. Frankly, it looked awful on mobile before. The navigation bar was squished so you had to scroll across. This is the default theme Caspar from Ghost.  

New theme - Liebling

I really wanted to test out the free Liebling theme before I made the changes but I couldn't get this to work on local host and nobody on the Ghost forum pages could tell me why. So at the weekend I just figured YOLO and changed the theme.

Lots of people have said it looks much nicer now which is awesome. I'm mostly glad about the improved mobile view.

I still need to decide on a header background image/colour but I'm really pleased that I finally changed the theme.

Prioritise making your site good on mobile

Most of my users view the site on mobile. So why was I procrastinating for so long? I dunno. It's a faff testing things on local host so in the end I just changed it and hoped for the best. I knew I could always revert to the old theme if it messed something up.

Hopefully the new design will be nicer for people to use so they don't bounce as much. Google measures things like time spent on a website so improving mobile view in particular means a better ranking in search engines. More importantly, I can show the site to friends and family without being embarrassed about how it looks on mobile.