There’s an old adage, “The cobbler’s children have no shoes.” It makes me chuckle, because it’s been awhile since I remodeled my own web site. The good news is that my site uses WordPress, and it was simply a matter of looking through several newer WordPress themes to find something that I wanted, which included features like:
- Reusing my existing logo
- Tagline. phone number and social icons in the header
- Search feature
- Responsive layout for browsing on Desktop, Tablet and Mobile devices
- Columns
- Easy to customize
- Full-width hero image on the Home page
Here are the handful of WordPress themes that I considered, and tried out with the Live Preview feature:
Ultimately I selected the OceanWP theme, because it was free and it met my requirements, but then I had to do some customization to get it just the way my eye prefers:
- Free themes have a footer credit link, so I hid that and used the three column widgets instead
- A WooCommerce icon appeared in the menu, but I only use WooCommerce for testing, so I hid that
- Link color – I changed it to match the orange in my logo
- Home page – I didn’t want to see the page title appearing, so I had that
- Bread crumbs – I wanted these on the left side, not the right side
- Page titles – I hid these, instead using bread crumbs
- Footer text – I changed the text color to a higher contrast
- Hero image on the Home page – I changed it to be full-width in the browser, and removed extra white space above it
So, after eight tweaks to the WordPress theme, it was in fine shape and passed my criteria, so I’m a happy web developer.
The architecture of WordPress allows for changes to the look of a site by just replacing the theme, so this has value to me when it’s time for a refresh. All consumer products undergo slight changes to the look, over time, so I recommend that my clients consider a web site refresh every few years in order to look current, and be relevant in the eyes of prospects and loyal customers.
If you want a refresh on your web site, then let’s talk to discuss what the end result should be.
