I’ve recently been working on a website for a personal project using a A wordpress (Impreza) template bought from ThemeForest and would like to share my experiences which have been really positive.
Building a company website with a web design agency
I have some experience of building website content. When I was working for an architectural practice in the UK I assisted in the commissioning of the new company website and worked alongside the web designers generating and adding content through their custom CMS (content management system). This is kind of like a very simple piece of software that you log into and then use the correct fields to add text and images to different parts of the website which was built by the company we commissioned (form a template I imagine). It was lovely to work with other designers and the process was really rewarding although testing at times when trying to balance the opinions of all those working in the company.
Simple wordpress site
Following that project I set up this simple wordpress website using a free theme from with wordpress but did not customise it very much despite the very irritating and ugly blue titles as I found it a little intimidating using code to make the changes I wanted. I managed to make some small changes after hours of research by pasting in small snippets of code into the back end of the website but it was a lengthy and laborious process and I always feared that I would make the whole thing fall over.
Using a paid wordpress theme
On the most recent project I’m now using a paid theme which completely opens up the wordpress CMS for me to be more creative and it’s an absolute blast. I love it. In architecture you have to learn software very quickly so I always relish the challenge of teaching myself something new. One of the elements I’ve really been enjoying is one of the bundled extensions that you get with the theme. Slider revolutions. With slider revolutions you can build mini slide shows with animated text and even video backgrounds. I am actually of the opinion that sliders have been overused in the last few years and a single slide is more effective but being ably to control the animation in of text etc can look really effective. I found a great tutorial on Youtube which helped me to explore the functionality of the plugin and managed to reproduce the examples with no trouble at all. I think that having knowledge of film editing software lke adobes premier and after effects was a bonus here though. Especially with timeline manipulation and layers.
Spoiler alert…
My next challenge is to pick a theme (or maybe use the same theme) to give this website a facelift. It’s very hard to choose as it’s not so easy to discern the main differences between the top themes. I’m currently looking at “x” to see how it’s portfolio building works. Watch this space!