ESC is developing a new website as part of its overall communications revival. (This is test number 1).
On this page, we show screenshots of the “Wanderer” theme/template from WordPress which we have customized to emulate a bit the “one.church” website which contains a lot of what we would like to have for the genevalutheran church here.
The screenshots can be viewed in this slide-show, or from the gallery in the side-bar which will convert to a manual carousel when any image is clicked on.
Not so bad, but there are a few items we want/need which are missing:
1. The ability to have text full width on the pages – there is no “full width” option for page content like there is ( for example ) here on the luther250 site template — isn’t that page beautiful ?!
2. Same for photos and video on the pages – limited to that central position which is a big restriction.
3. And no way, to discover how to have videos play in a separate full width window – which would be a good compromise for not having larger screens on the page.
4. No “grid page” like we have here on luther250 for the forum page – which allows displaying a grid of items – clicking on the image links to the full story behind it. — However, there is a “portfolio function” which can fulfill that need (as can be seen in slides 18 & 19), but again this theme severely limits by squeezing them into that narrow central space.
Good news is that WordPress has moved the “portfolio” to be one of the template-independent functionalities – so whichever theme we choose, the portfolio should be available to us and we can choose the number of columns through simple scrips accessible to us; just the space in which the portfolio is displayed will vary.
5. Missed also is having a normal menu somewhere – that hamburger is fine but maybe better is the speed and ease-of-use of a standard pull-down menu, which is always visible and active.
6. Look at slide numbers 4&5 – these horizontal bars show the selected “blog entries” (admittedly they are made more attractive when hovering the mouse over them – with a featured photo behind each transparent bar) but they show only the title, no other text here. There are so many better ways of displaying groups of blog posts – as on this site for example – or here .
– 2018 website tests – #2 WordPress “Lodestar” theme
luther250.com 