• March 29, 2013
  • 0

Creating Visual Identity With WordPress: The Hardy Portfolio Theme

The term “visual identity” is generally used in the corporate world as a euphemism for branding, and often doesn’t amount to much more than the consideration of logo design and a corporate colour scheme. To me, this is a restrictive and unimaginative use of an expression that can be redeployed to suggest something far more creative and complex.

Instead of thinking about visual identity from the top down as part of corporate marketing strategy, I want to think about it from the bottom up, at the level of individual pieces of content, and in the context of the independent Web.

The point of departure for my take on visual identity is the latest portfolio theme by ThemeTrust and it’s called the Hardy Theme. The theme allows you to style the visual experience of each individual portfolio entry by adding your own background image and arranging the portfolio content on top.

Granted, this is nothing new in the WordPress domain. It has almost become second nature for premium WordPress themes to offer background image uploads on posts and pages. However, where the Hardy Theme excels is in weaving each individually crafted portfolio entry into a single front page content stream. The result is that content is differentiated at the level of its individual identity instead of the usual divisions achieved through layout and spacing.

One of the benefits of this approach to content presentation and particularly for a portfolio, which is after all a means of promoting your work to potential clients, is that visitors get an immediate sense of the range and scope of your work; and a “dialogue” takes place on an emotional level with the user.

By working in this way, through a series of visual juxtapositions, the overall identity of your site, your brand or your business becomes the sum total of individually crafted pieces of work that speak for themselves, instead of the usual attempt to fit each project into a single corporate identity mold.

  • March 26, 2013
  • 5

Introducing Leeflets – a Web Publishing Platform Designed by WordPress Gurus

It’s not often that I’m blown away by a new application or piece of software, but after signing up to Leeflets as a beta tester, I’m pumped. Actually, it reminds me a bit of 2004 and my first steps with an early WordPress.

So what is Leeflets? Well that’s kind of the whole point of my video, so please go check that out first and then come back for the links and extra info below. Make sure you grab a drink while you watch, this is a 16-minuter! Sometimes these things just take time.

Ok so in a nutshell, Leeflets is an open source web publishing platform with an emphasis on simple design and ease of use. It is geared towards developing small, single-page websites. This includes things like personal portfolios, events pages, landing/launch pages, websites for small businesses; in short, any site that doesn’t need to handle large amounts of data.

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  • March 25, 2013
  • 2

10 More Stunning Horizontal Scrolling WordPress Themes for 2013

In September 2012, I released a small collection of 10 horizontal scrolling WordPress themes which proved, against my expectation, to be hugely popular. I remember thinking at the time of making that list that nobody really cares about horizontal themes, it’s always palmed off as a gimmick in the WordPRess theme world. Boy was I wrong! It turns out that there is a great deal of interest in this somewhat unusual form factor.

Since that post, I have kept track of new horizontal theme releases and it’s taken over half a year to collect the next 10 horizontal themes that I present to you here. This delay is not a result of my laziness, it’s a reflection of the fact that so few horizontal themes are being released. In a world increasingly moving towards mobile devices with touchscreen capabilities, you would have thought it would be quite the opposite. Horizontal designs lend themselves well to the swiping gestures that are native to smartphones and tablets. I suspect the reticence comes down to a usability issue; that while “going sideways” may be great for mobile, it’s still deemed to be too clunky for desktop. While there’s still some truth in this, I think things are improving very quickly and this is a topic that I will address in a forthcoming blog post. Stay tuned for that.

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  • March 19, 2013
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WordPress Premium Charity Themes, A Category Too Far?

I’ve spoken before about the function of categories in the general organisation and distribution of WordPress themes (free & premium) across the Web. For me, categories in this sense function as a double-edged sword. On the one hand, categories can be very useful in classifying, organising and enabling easier user access to WordPress themes. On the other hand, categories can also be restrictive, particularly in terms of creativity. Let me briefly explain what I mean by this.

Most premium WordPress theme shops and marketplaces use similar category names in the organisation of their themes. You’ll find structural categories such as blog, magazine, portfolio, eCommerce and so on. Each of these categories describes a fundamental structural attribute of the themes it represents. You’ll also find thematic categories such as creative, technology and nonprofit. Each of these categories describes something of the end use of the themes it represents.

In both cases, categories are used to delimit a particular field or “niche” as it’s often referred to in marketing spiel. These niches are essentially small markets that theme creators supply their products to. The more demand there is within a specific category or niche, the more that category is deemed “valid” by its community of users. And so finally then, the more “validation” a specific category receives, the less likely its boundaries are going to change. That means that anyone working at the creative end of WordPress in the interest of generating income is already operating in deference to and within the restrictions of a specific category.

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  • March 18, 2013
  • 6

State of the WordPress Community

WordPress Community

Following the January-February 2013 WordPress theme licensing debacle, Tung Do, the man behind DevPress, wrote a blog post calling for a new WordPress community space to champion the non-commercial, collaborative ethos that defined WordPress in its early years as a simple blogging platform. I thought this was an interesting proposition and one worth thinking about in a little more detail. Before I get into that, let me summarize the events in the licensing spat for those who may have missed it. If you want to go straight to the discussion of WordPress community then you can jump to it here.

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