Last Updated on March 7, 2024
Clients come in a variety of flavors and types. They always have and they always will. What sets a great creative apart is her/his flexibility and resourcefulness in designing various websites.
The demand for website creation has reached epic proportions. Doctors, companies, freelancers, non-profit organizations, and even government agencies are looking to achieve more visibility – online. All of these contractors might choose to put their faith in you, their web designer. As it turns out, that is both a blessing, and a challenge.
You have to walk in your clients’ shoes and understand who is supposed to view their websites. Then, the real work begins. Make sure you get the best tools on the market, those that will complement your skills and help you do a great job. For WordPress projects, you want a feature-packed theme that is easy to customize, rooted in solid code, responsive, and versatile.
Deliver E-commerce Websites that Sell
A lot of vendors come knocking at our door nowadays, so the bigger part of web design projects turn out to be commercial websites.
Naturally, you always have to throw in appealing graphics, textures and fonts. Yet, the recipe for a high-conversion web store is using high quality product images, and designing a smooth user experience. No ‘stuffocation’. Viewers should enjoy browsing through product pages, and searching for specific items in stock.
X Theme is comprised of individual designs: Integrity, Renew, Icon, and Ethos (so far). WooCommerce is integrated in all four of them, so picking one for your client’s shop is a matter of style. You will find that each stack is endlessly customizable, and that 16 fantastic extensions are included in the 3.0 release. Let’s see what they can do for your web store.
After you had some fun shaping the theme around to your client’s needs, you can move on to constructing gorgeous sign-up forms. How? With the MailChimp integration from X Theme. It’s all very simple. You can also grab this opportunity to subscribe guests and members to a MailChimp e-mailing list.
If you wish to set up a solid help desk that creates loyal customers, you’ll be happy to know that Olark facilitates communication. And, whenever you want to push forward a new product or offer, there is no better way to do it than through a full page video that loads at hyper speed (Video Lock). Choose the exact width for your responsive video, insert a caption in header/footer, and establish when it should start/stop playing.
How do you like the front porch of this web store made with X Theme? It is based on Renew, which means it’s ruled by elements of flat design. And it’s beautiful.
Easily Create a Remarkable Portfolio
The perfect portfolio is straightforward and shows personality. You may have rocked hundreds of projects throughout your career, and congratulations on that, but let me set the record straight: only a select few should make it on your portfolio. And forget about your favorite ones for a second. Instead, try to display projects that received the most praise and recognition in the past. Those are the ones that will advertise your services best.
Of course, you should be thinking along the same lines when you’re designing portfolios for your clients. And don’t forget, the easier your portfolios are to navigate, the better. No one likes to feel like they’re looking for a needle in a haystack.
The first three Stacks from X Theme would help you give shape to equally splendid portfolio websites. Later on, we’ll be looking at the portfolio of a motion artist, which draws on the Icon stack. But first, let’s have a look at some 3.0 extensions that Themeco either created from zero or adapted for seamless performance with X.
You could move forward with a parallax website, in which case you’ll love the Smooth scrolling extension. It allows you to change the native physics of your scroll bar for a wicked awesome user experience.
You’re already familiar with Visual Composer. It will help you set up a portfolio page in a jiffy. What you don’t know is that the X Theme version of it is a bit different. Themeco modified it to integrate well with the X ecosystem.
Next, we have the additional benefit of constructing superb slideshows with Slider Revolution. You can decide when captions should appear, and use fabulous effects for slide transitions: parallax, 3D, or zoom-in.
Example of a brazen portfolio website created with X Theme:
Author Blogs that Attract Readers
Rule number one of a great blog is posting quality content. But that’s none of your concern (unless you’re thinking of starting a design blog, in which case – yes, it is). However, it takes months for a freshly made blog to draw in readers, no matter how interesting their posts are.
This is where you come in. Digital creatives can exact an early influence on the masses, and hook visitors with the interface design. Blogs should have a good logo, an inspired choice of colors, clean navigation, and text displayed in attractive fonts.
X Theme prepared four amazing stacks for blog design. It also presents several handy extensions, like the following.
Content Dock is the non-intrusive content box that slowly appears on screen as users are reading a certain post. It serves to suggest other related content, and convince visitors to follow future posts. Configure the Content Dock using a text widget, and shortcodes – it’s a breeze. The 767px lower limit to display sizes is justified. If the Dock showed on smaller screens, then it would have obscured the actual blog content. And we don’t want that, do we?
Yet another useful extension from X Theme 3.0 is Custom 404. If users happen to click on any broken exterior links, they could be greeted by a witty message, funny background image, and why not, a search bar to head back to known territory.
Lastly, you can pave the way for readers to engage with blog posts. Facebook comments can be a pain to install, but X Theme makes it easy.
Feast you eyes on this lovely magazine blog made with Ethos:
Web Designers and Themeco – A Match Made in Heaven
If I told you that it’s possible to work with one WordPress theme for all of your projects, would that be such a stretch of the imagination? Times have changed, and creatives are always on the lookout for solutions that help the design websites better. Themeco is dedicated to implementing amazing functionality into its all-in-one theme. The practical extensions from X 3.0 are just the beginning. This year, web designers can expect wonderful things from the versatile and genuinely unparalleled X Theme.