What I hate and love about the internet is that its changing all the time. I hate it because there is a never ending amount of material to learn every day. It changes at light speed, it seems, and no human can keep on top of it. What I love about it is that it changes all the time and that’s exciting. New products, new functionality, and we all want more. What I love about WordPress it that it has just the tools to keep me up to speed, even light speed. And if WP doesn’t do it, other frameworks or tools come along that will plug into WP that closes the gap.
Let me give you an example. For clients on a budget, I used to use the themes that are introduced through the WP dashboard within WP.org. There are many, but more than half are not even touched by a graphic designer, whose specialty is typography, color and layout. A lonely developer probably sat at his pc and knocked it out… He is the guy at the supermarket that wears two color plaids. So, you can’t trust that he is also the guy to provide you with your free theme.
So then I found out about Elegant Themes and Theme Forest. These are online theme companies that have been scrutinized by a designer, or the developer is also an experienced graphic designer. They cost between $30 and $60 and are very useful. The problem is that the themes are not very flexible. There are a few tricks, shortcodes and such, but the layout and fonts are pretty much set in stone.
There are customers who are not quite comfortable with an out of the box design. They want to personalize it. Or as one client who made up her own acronym… They want SECSI: simple, elegant, compelling, stylish, informative.
I’m playing with a new tool that will customize a layout and then export it to WordPress. There are also themes that are called frameworks and are customizable once installed. I’ll report more on those when I have more time. Hopefully that will be soon, before the internet surprises us again.
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