It felt great this past weekend to redesign my website, just for the fun of it! I think nature concurred with my spontaneous giving-in to this pleasure, because here in Denver-area, it snowed all day Sunday. What better thing to do than cozy up inside with my laptop and my website. You see, I got this idea in my head of some new background image applications and mixing up the ever-so-popular slider feature on my home page. Not to mention that I’ve been enjoying a great free WordPress Theme called Tempera that has more custom page options. I’ve been using this for my clients, so I finally decided to make the switch over to it for myself. Here’s how it’s coming along.
The theme is built by Cryout Creations and includes a lot of what I consider to be must-have features for an owner-maintained-friendly website that can be up-to-par with latest design capabilities. These are options like Responsiveness, Cry-Out Columns, and tons more. Within the Tempera Settings under the Appearance options in my WordPress dashboard, are some of the best customizations I’ve seen among WordPress themes lately. They walk even a first-time blog-site builder through great options, but with some good descriptions on what exactly you’re doing and making changes to. Things like Text options allows you a variety of different types of fonts, the Color settings get nice and detailed, and the slider creation options start out with the default examples of slide images and text that come with the site so you can see in your preview where your text is going.
Other great options include a Header section where you can upload a custom logo file image, a background image or color, and a favicon (that nifty little image in the tab of your page’s browser – nice little branding touch). My other faves with this theme are the Presentation Page, which comes with easy-to-use columns that you put together in the Widget settings under Appearance in your general WordPress dashboard. Then one of the gems – a page template called “Category Page with intro”. I’ve been dying to find this already included in a theme rather than having to use a plug-in, of which most I’ve tried have not worked. So now, I can create a page with a nice little intro written about that category, tie it to that category I have for certain blog posts (comment below if you need help on these particular instructions), and in the Menu settings (found under Appearance) I can choose that page to be a in menu if I desire. The other template I love is the Magazine Layout option you can turn on and off for displaying blog posts. I really love how it maximizes the space and has a different layout, easy for an overview of the recent posts. Take a look at how I am using that on my home page (or in the verbage of Tempera, the Presentation Page).
At this point, the only thing I’m still refining is to do some custom CSS coding or something to tell my only presentation page to show my background image and tell my content section and header on the presentation page to be transparent. Until then, I have the background image and these sections set to transparent in the regular settings, which as you can see, means that they carry through to every page on my site…yikes! Not my style and too busy and hard to read the text…I know. In the meantime, I’m doing what I can at least on this post, with some basic HTML added to the post text for a white background.
Come back soon to see the progress and learn of how I figure out even more creative things with this new theme. If you have solutions and ideas for me or questions and something I can help you with, definitely reach out to me with that too. Till next time!