A site redesign just went live, and here’s a high-level overview of what changed. A full write-up with deeper detail and a side-by-side comparison with the previous design is coming Monday.

What’s New

  • Ghost Busting: After 19 years, the theme had accumulated plenty of legacy pieces. Excavating it turned up a number of ghosts worth cleaning out.

  • Modern Dev Tooling: A significant upgrade over the previous five-year-old workflow, now including Prettier, Stylelint, GitHub Actions, and auto cache-busting.

  • Security: Claude was used to run a holistic audit — specifically prompted to review recent WordPress security release notes and identify areas where the theme could be hardened to match WordPress’s current direction.

  • Sass Rewrite: Overall CSS size dropped from 180 KB (31.7 KB zipped) to 169 KB (24.6 KB zipped). Not a dramatic reduction, but a meaningful one.

  • Design-ish System: Broader theme consistency through semantic tokens for colors, fonts, font sizes, and other reused values.

  • Theme Toggle: The site has long leaned dark despite most content sitting against a white background. With a dark mode effectively already in place, a creamy light theme was added as the toggle counterpart.

  • Jawbreaker Texture: A texture named “Jawbreaker” — after the candy — appears throughout the site as a recurring visual element.

  • New Almanac Index: The Almanac page is now a proper index of CSS features, designed to get you where you need to go quickly.

  • New Guides Index: The Guides page now features a highlighted guide, a widget showing newly added and updated guides, and a categorized grid of everything else below.

  • Author Pages: The right sidebar was moved to the left, and the author image and bio were brought in alongside it, allowing article content to extend closer to the top of the page.

  • WordPress Admin Styles: Fonts and text styles in the admin area now have minimal styling that reflects the front end.

The full write-up on Monday will dig deeper into each of these changes along with a visual comparison to the previous design.