A New Face for 2014: New Website powered by WordPress
How hard could it be? Grab one of them handy WordPress themes, stick in a few changes, bang it up on to the server, and off she goes.
Even after years of experience there is still the temptation; a fancy theme will make site design a free ride. Another week and more of experience reminds me again of the original lesson: content is slow! Good content has to be slow. It takes time to find and refine pictures that fit, sentences that gel, statements that do not contradict. It takes time to pick them and time to fix them and time to review and tinker with them.
Still, the use of a new theme made the presentation side a whole lot easier. The Impreza one that we went with is a popular choice (http://themeforest.net/item/impreza-retina-responsive-wordpress-theme/6434280). It has:
- Oodles of built in goodies: a rich set of bits and bobs to add and edit, from social icons to galleries and buttons
- Nice set of default template content pages and posts to use as a guide for your own content.
- Pretty galleries and the Revolution Slider built in
- Responsive, HTML 5, ‘contemporary’ looking
- Fairly robust and usable Visual Composer
But wait, wait, this isn’t a sales pitch. Negatives include
- Common theme and style so risk on genericness
- Visual Composer is slow to load, especially on a faraway server
- Doesn’t include the real content
Well of course it doesn’t include the real content; but content is king. Presentation is worth a second or two of “Ohh, that’s nice”. Beyond that, text, images, a message.
We decided to go with a ‘local’ approach, and use the fantastic scenery and scenes of Galway to give the pages a visual consistency. One of the main rules was to avoid all stock images, even if the alternative was a hastily prepared badly lit snapshot. Hastily prepared, badly lit, but consistent innit!