With so many great website development tools on the market, it was always going to be difficult to choose which one to use to develop the new Profile Learning website. Whilst we remain fans of Adobe products, we aren’t against using rapid development tools when they deliver the right result. And this new, responsive Metro-style WordPress theme from Themeforest and designed by Crumina just had to be given a test run! Modern clean design coupled with powerful integration of blog and portfolio pages and fully touch enabled means that the One Touch theme had just about everything we were looking for. More importantly, our site was up and running in 24 hours and we had a lot of fun working with this design.
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Welcome to the new Profile Learning website
With so many great website development tools on the market,…
OK. So why WordPress? A lot of eyebrows were raised inside the company – and a lot of people have asked me “why not build the site in HTML/CSS and JScript using something like Dreamweaver?” (since we develop other, client sites using this approach). After all, WordPress is for blog sites, right? Surely you can’t build a serious corporate site in WordPress?
So let me explain why I chose WordPress and the One Touch theme from Themeforest….
I will be honest. I developed the first draft site using the latest version of Adobe Muse. Muse is relatively new and I have high hopes for it as a website rapid development tool – but even the new release isn’t quite there yet – and the site, though good, didn’t quite have the modern interactive feel to it I was looking for.
What exactly were the main site criteria I considered important:
Responsive Design – I know you can build that and there are arguments that say you can only go so far in making your site mobile-friendly without creating a separate mobile site. But it takes time. And to have a site that does it automatically saves that time – and that means saving money.
Web Content Management – In a recent article on the subject (which you will find elsewhere on this site) I made the point that a blog site has all the characteristics of a WCMS. Using this approach, we can update the site by adding posts to it rather than having to create new pages. Check it out – it works fine! You found this bit of the site didn’t you?
Touch Enabled – There are more people than you might imagine that will access your site on a touch device – just look around you and see how many people have their iPad open!
Modern Metro UI – I haven’t yet quite got used to my Windows 8 laptop – but it’s growing on me and I have finally stopped launching everything from the classic desktop in favour of the Metro slider menus. In 12 months my guess is I will be cursing everything that isn’t in this format.
Social Media Enabled – Of course I can add all the icons and the links – but if they are already there in each page template, how much time does that save?
I know this sounds counterintuitive but isn’t it better to start with a highly interactive website and make the bits you don’t want interactive, static – rather than trying to make a static website interactive?
Of course, websites are always a matter of personal taste – but I know this one looks great. I realise that this has more to do with the designer of One Touch than me – but it surely won’t stop me taking full credit for it!