WordPress themes (or templates) are a great benefit to web developers. Someone has already taken the time to develop, or incorporate, various styles, effects and layouts for you. The back-end usually lets you tweak colors, position some elements and more. But while you can simply load a WordPress theme, set some settings, and leave it at that — to do it right, you usually need to do a lot more work.
That usually means setting up a child theme — a sub-theme that allows you to overwrite styling, create or override functions, and edit page templates. Here are a few recent examples of some sites that we adapted to work harder for our clients.
Barreiras Home Inventory Service
The WordPress theme for Meaford’s Barreiras Home Inventory Service had a few neat bells and whistles on the main page. But just filling in the blanks with our content would be slacking off. The theme had animated bars which were intended for — well, I’m not really sure what they were intended for. But they lent themselves well to drawing attention to the benefits of a home inspection. So we restyled the colour of the bars in our child theme, and re-coded the page template to include a checkmark graphic instead of the numerical percentage originally built in. We also coded an additional animated headline in the default call-to-action. Stopping the slider after one run-through left the key call-to-action up and available. Of course, copywriting comes with your myFavoriteMarketer project.
Walters Falls Group of Artists
Walter’s Falls Group of Artists holds an annual exhibition in Walter’s Falls, between Owen Sound and Meaford. The group was looking for a refresh for their website which would work on mobile and allow for better navigation and display of artists’ work. We chose a WordPress theme that was intended for an individual portfolio, and by creative use of WordPress categories and coding, adapted it to showcase all artists in an animated style on the main page — in random order so that with each visit you get a different gallery of images and no single artist gets the preferred position. Then each artist receives their own easily-added portfolio page. New work goes directly into their gallery with a click.
Rockcliffe Estates
The design and coding modifications to the Rockcliffe Estates website template are fairly minor, but we made sure that the clean, modern design our client wanted was enhanced by some subtle styling in the WordPress theme. Once again, marketing copy and storytelling about the Meaford and Owen Sound-area real estate development were provided by myFavoriteMarketer. We also set up a parallel Mandarin version of the website accessed with a single click from any page.