Ok – this new WordPress theme is going to work out. It’s an amazingly uncomplicated design and not too busy which I feel works better for a blog-type site. I’m using the Elementor Pro page builder for WordPress to customize the theme. The base theme is Hello Elementor which is a theme with minimal styling. It’s a perfect canvas to work with if you plan on customizing. Customizing a theme that has a lot of options can present tricky issues if you are overriding parts of that theme via Elementor templates. It’s not that you can’t fix any problems the theme might present, it’s just easier to avoid them by using a minimal theme.
Despite the Hello Elementor theme used here, that’s not what you are seeing. I’ve loaded a template kit in Elementor on top of it so even the minimal styling of the Hello Elementor theme isn’t visible – you’ll notice that buttons here are blue and square on my website, not the orange and round of Hello Elementor. (The purpose of using the Hello Elementor WordPress theme was simply to provide a minimal base theme to override.) The template kit controls everything you see. It gives me options for customizing pages on the fly depend on the page or page type, changing header depending on\what you are viewing and so on.
I can’t praise Elementor enough – though the pro version will cost a bit. There are competing page builders available for WordPress, but I haven’t tried any of them.
It’s amazing what you can do with WordPress – about half of the sites on the web use it.