Above: Say goodbye the the old home page design, mostly same as the new home page design.
After three ten-hour days, the main work of switching the user-interface of TechNewsTT is done. After a few instances of having this process go terribly wrong, I’ve learned to read the documentation before buying a theme to be sure that there is a carry-over of key features that I think it should have.
Some features have been lost. The bullet-points that I use to introduce a summary for longer articles is gone. I could replicate the feature, but probably won’t. Unless there is a tremendous outcry among the readership for the TL:DR value it brought to skimming viewers.
I’ve also lost the post views for all the articles that were gathered by the previous theme. I run two packages that track how the site is used, Google Analytics and JetPack, to get an optimal view of what’s actually going on, so I can find that out for any story that’s been published.
Losing the theme’s post views also means I lost the surge in views that was the result of an unusual surge in viewing traffic out of China that affected many sites and has never been adequately explained. Those weren’t real visitors and Google’s filters screened them out.
I’ve used Google Analytics reports to manually insert post views for most of the top 50 posts between January 01, 2021 and May 31, 2026.
Why was all this necessary? As noted here, the theme I’ve been using since December 2020, InHype, was getting long in the tooth. The product was clearly in maintenance mode and the developer seems to have lost interest in the news website sector.
In all fairness, that was the case with the two previous themes I’d used before that. There comes a point when adding plug-ins to get features that should be included in the theme describes an inflection point of diminishing returns.
If I’ve done my job well, you probably won’t notice much of a change. Most of the basic layout of the home page, category pages and post pages remains the same. Most of the time was spent figuring how how the theme worked and is most efficiently manipulated.
The site may look pretty much the same on the user side of things, but getting there has been different for every theme change, particularly themes that serve the very particular needs of online publishers.
I’ve learned to stay away from themes that depend on third party “builders” like Elementor and WP Bakery (ripping WP Bakery out of another website I support was a particularly painful experience – there was code cruft everywhere on that project and it had less than 100 post pages, TechNewsTT has just under 2,000).
I’ve made peace with sophisticated themes that include their own, theme specific builder features, as long as the overall theme supports Gutenberg.
Among the gains? I’ve turned off seven plug-ins that I no longer need. The search function returns a far more usable page of options. Related posts suggestions are more usefully and accurately chosen from tags.
At least one user has having issues with the newsletter sign-up form. I cannot find any issue with it on my end, but if for some reason you are getting a request for a non-existent visual Captcha (you shouldn’t, because the security system doesn’t work that way and honestly, I hate those), please reach out and let me know.
Two things are still being actively tweaked. Most users visit a post page first, not the home page and I’m not satisified that the post page design is optimal, so that may change. I certainly don’t care for the widescreen format used by the first version of the single post options that I’m working with. The way the theme handles mobile display is also beating me at this point and while it is functional, I’m not overjoyed with it at this point, so if you visit on mobile, be patient.
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Just that. No spam.
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TechNewsTT reports on technology from and about Trinidad and Tobago and the wider Caribbean.
@ Mark Lyndersay, 2026
