Many creative bloggers use the Hermes theme to create a professional and modern WordPress site. We are glad to announce a new version of Hermes which comes with a lot of improvements regarding performance and accessibility. Also, it includes some great theme enhancements.
Hermes is a unique and modern theme evoking a sense of minimalism, elegance, and simplicity. It’s perfectly suited for creative bloggers in any field.
Custom Colors
In order to reduce the amount of CSS used when custom colors are set, we’ve completely refactored the Custom Color functionality of the theme. Also, we’ve fixed some issues regarding the Custom Color functionality. Moreover, the theme now comes with two new color controls for primary and secondary colors. This change provides more control over the main colors of the site.
The Custom Color functionality has better support for Classic and Block editors. You can now see your site’s custom colors while using these editors. The new version of this functionality reduces the amount of inconsistency between the editor and your actual site.
Since the theme now has a new Custom Color functionality, the accent color needs to be selected again after updating to version 2.0.
Custom Fonts
The Custom Fonts functionality of the theme has received several improvements as well. Now, you can see your custom fonts in the Block and Classic editors. Therefore, you can better understand how your content will look on your actual site.
Thanks to refactoring of the Custom Fonts functionality, we were able to reduce the amount of custom CSS used when custom fonts are set to make your page lighter. You can still easily change default fonts using simple controls provided by the WordPress core.
Block editor
Even though the Block Editor looks different from the Classic Editor, it’s still a powerful tool designed to help you build and design pages and posts using blocks. Hermes now comes with a much better support for the Block editor. We’ve fixed a lot of style inconsistencies between the Editor and your actual site when using default WordPress blocks.
Theme icons
Icons communicate with visitors of your site without relying on words. Hermes uses icons to provide better guidelines of the use of your site for the site visitors. A new version of the theme comes with a totally new way of displaying icons on your site.
Initially, we have used the font icons library to display icons in the theme. It worked well but we’ve found that this approach has its downsides: accessibility and performance problems. To resolve these problems, we’ve refactored the icons functionality of the theme. Now, the theme uses SVG icons instead of the font icons library.
Accessibility
Accessibility is an essential part of your site. We’ve conducted a review of the theme’s templates to provide better accessibility for your site visitors. As a result, a lot of sections of the theme have been refactored. The theme templates have received some changes to provide more semantic structure for various pages on your site.
Performance
We want your site to be fast. This is why almost every template of this theme has received improvements in order to increase a performance of your site. The goal of a new update was to keep the theme’s templates structured and minimal to decrease HTTP overload.
Also, we have made improvements to the theme design system. A new version of the theme design system allows to eliminate duplicates in styles and to keep the design of your site more consistent.
Moreover, we were able to optimize the theme styles in order to reduce the amount of styles used on the page of your site. As a result, your page can now load faster compared to the previous version of the theme.
Blog layouts
The blog page and other archive views are more flexible now. It is possible to change a layout of the grid shown in archive views. The theme comes with four options: Default, Three columns, Two columns, One column. You can find these options in the Theme Options.
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