I’ve started playing around with the aesthetics of my blog by exploring different website templates. A few quick thoughts:

1. Choosing a WordPress themes is an exercise in tedium. Decision fatigue is incredibly real and unfortunately, quantity of choice does not translate into quality. Medium does a good job of having a one-size-fits-all template aesthetic. This allows you to focus on content as opposed to aesthetics.
2. WordPress content management within a page is reasonably user friendly. However, WordPress page management is irredeemably atrocious. The themes primarily rely on configuration settings for each page, which are set manually without bulk update. This makes retroactively applying setting changes extremely tedious.
3. It’s easy to hide quality difference behind a flashy aesthetic layer. There are many premium WordPress themes that supposedly offer more flexibility and features. Their demo-sites are indistinguishable from the free WordPress themes.
4. I’ve currently landed on the Hemingway Rewritten theme for my own blog. It’s blocky, photo-unfriendly, and conservative in layout. It’s most redeeming quality is that I dislike it the least among the multitude of WordPress theme I’ve tried.
5. I’m reminded that CSS is purgatory on Earth. The basic WordPress package won’t allow you to access any CSS customization, but all the actually useful bits of WordPress themes rely on these customizations. In order to fully use even a “free” WordPress theme, you’ll still need to buy an upgraded WordPress subscription – sneaky business model by WordPress. This can be incredibly frustrating for someone who’s only using WordPress to avoid the fiddly visual bits.