I have been working with WordPress sites since 2009. So, I initially shied away from this extra-credit assignment. However, I never really liked the orange of my previous theme. I selected it to go with the header picture of fall in Maine. I could have picked a complementary color instead, blue to the orange foliage, and modified that template in that way.
However, I’ve never done much with a left-hand menu, so this theme looked significantly different. I wanted as well to have a new header image that reflects where I am living. I am a little troubled that the Twitter widget never comes out of the dark bottom part of the image. I did adjust the font color for the menu element to a darker color. I will continue to experiment with that and see if going lighter on the font color works better.
I also installed the plugin Autoptimize — which optimizes your website, concatenating the CSS and JavaScript code, and compressing it. We will see if the site loads any quicker as a result.