This is the first post in a multi-part series where I document the rebuilding and promotion of an existing website. Find out more
Pre-import
The pre-import went pretty well. I had to add author and comments to several of the post types to preserve the data from the Drupal site. All of the posts and comments imported straight into the new site.
There are a few broken posts types, such as the old photo gallery, and extra fields for member profiles. I’ve established that I can get to this data in the old Drupal database, and will fix that when I add those features to the website.
Themes
Hmm, now I have to select a theme. There’s a lot to consider.
Let’s run through some popular features, and see how I feel about them (roughly top to bottom):
- Header – Important to have an advertising banner in the header. A sticky header would also be good.
First, let’s look at the logo, as this will help to give context to the design
Campervan Life logo, in blue
I’ll run through the options
AlleycatThemes
The premium theme company that I ran. Surely I would dog-food my own themes? Nope. Those themes were amazing at building pages, brochure websites. They had lots of options, and custom page builder (Visual Composer) components. There was a lot of code, much of which needed re-writing. Too bloated.
Something from ThemeForest – Nope. Too bloated. I am sure there are some great themes on ThemeForest, but I just don’t have the confidence to use one.
https://demo.tagdiv.com/newsmag/ – Feels narrow and cluttered. Some good features.
http://demos.cubellthemes.com/?product=wp15zine
ElmaStudio – http://www.elmastudio.de/en/themes/
