WordPress theme – Karen Rempel – New York Senior Technical Writer Team Lead

You might notice my top-ranking Vancouver technical writer site looks a little different today. I updated to the WordPress twentysixteen theme. You may recall I gave an enthusiastic shout-out to WordPress last May, when I updated my site to use the twentyfifteen theme. I still think WordPress is awesome, and it would appear that website builders the world over agree with me. As of today’s date (February 6, 2016), 59.1% of websites in the world use WordPress, according to W3Techs.

It was a snap to make the change, taking about 2 hours total to select the theme, install it, create a few graphics in the right size, and make a few minor formatting tweaks. I added my own copyright information to the footer, customized the link font colour, and changed the font size for the tags in the left column. This is an amazing accomplishment (on the part of their coders to make the task so easy), and I am very appreciative of the service that WordPress provides for free to the world computing community.

I made these changes using a combination of the user-friendly WordPress editing platform and direct coding in the .php and .css files.

While I was at it, I took a look at my Google Analytics for the site. I thought it would be fun to compare the stats from the past month to the stats I reported in May 2015:

Device	May 2015	Feb 2016
Desktop	918 – 92%	936 – 89%
Mobile Phone	70 – 7%	92 – 9%
Tablet	15 – 1%	26 – 2%
Total Visitors	1,003	1,054

The table above shows that the percentage of mobile users has increased slightly. Still, the majority of people who searched for a technical writer used their desktop computer, which makes sense. I imagine people would prefer to do this at work, not while lounging on the beach!

Browser	May 2015	Feb 2016
Chrome	729	702
FireFox	115	127
Safari	72	108
Internet Explorer	31	90
Other	56	27
Total Visitors	1,003	1,054

No changes in the browser pecking order either, though the use of Internet Explorer did increase significantly.

I welcome your thoughts on the new site design. Drop me a line!

Back to Top

Save

Thanks for visiting my revised website! Hi, I’m Karen Rempel, a Vancouver-based documentation specialist and senior technical writer.

I just updated this website to be mobile-friendly using the fantastic WordPress theme Twenty Fifteen. I also updated my BC Wilderness Visions website, using the same theme but different settings. Check it out to see the striking effects that can be achieved by simple colour changes.

I want to give a big shout-out to WordPress for this awesome theme. It only took me a day to update both websites to use this theme. I was previously using Silver Light by Blog Oh! Blog. I loved this theme and didn’t want to change, but Google forced me into action by notifying me that my Google ranking would slip if I didn’t make my site resizable for mobile phones and tablets. What can you do?

I checked out my Google Analytics for the past month, and found that of the 1000+ visitors to this technical writing website:

918 used desktops. This is what I thought! My clients are typically at their desk at work when they think about their need for a technical writer, do a search, and call me.
70 used their mobile phones.
15 used their tablets.

Technical writers bridge people and technology

So isn’t it interesting that people use technology to find technical writers? Most of my clients find me by searching on the internet. And thanks to Google Analytics, I know which devices they use, what countries they search from, and even what browser they use!

Here are the stats for browsers used to find this technical writing website:

Chrome – 729
FireFox – 115
Safari – 72
Internet Explorer – 31

Please drop me a line to let me know what you think of the new site! And if you like, tell us what device and browser you used to get here. 🙂

Back to Top

Tag: WordPress theme

New York Technical Writer Converts to Twenty Sixteen

New York Technical Writer Updates to Twenty Fifteen

Technical writers bridge people and technology