I think this website is very well put together. In fact it encourages me to make mine better. Theresa’s website is very easy on the eyes and full of information about her. The site is also very easy to navigate. Good work!
Portfolio/Gallery Plug-in
To showcase my art and crafts, I chose Visual Portfolio, Photo Gallery & Posts Grid WordPress plug-in by the nK team.
Visual Portfolio has the most users with the Twenty Nineteen theme that I am using on my site. The valuable features are:
- Many types of galleries in template
- Effects to move captions and have captions emerge
- Posts Grid that are clean looking and easy to navigate
- Video and Audio Popups
- Sort and Filter ability
There is a support forum on the WordPress.org site at https://wordpress.org/support/plugin/visual-portfolio/. In the FAQ, I found out how to add shadow boxes using CSS and how to download the Visual Portfolio documentation at https://visualportfolio.co/documentation/getting-started/.
With this portfolio plug-in, my customers will see the same photo functionality that is on corporate and large eCommerce sites.
Form Plug-in
For my site, I chose WordPress Contact Form Maker, Version 1.13.23 from the WebDorado Form Builder Team. I wanted a simple contact form builder, which I could use without learning form programming languages. This plug-in has over 2 million users with a review score of 4.5 and the support site, WordPress Contact Form Maker , is easy to use and lists its contact email as info@web-dorado.com.
The reason I choose WordPress Contact Form Maker is: my top 2 criteria are its top 2 features – drag and drop form builder and responsive, mobile-friendly development. I want to quickly see the form options and drag them to the page I am building, knowing whatever I do will look perfect on mobile, tablet and desktop screens. Additional features of WordPress Contact Form Maker are:
- 5 pre-built templates
- integrated payment form
- adding conditional logic
- contact submission management
- customizable themes
- spam protection
- additional plug-ins for advanced functionality available.
Responsive Theme
I chose the Twenty Nineteen theme from WordPress.org. Twenty Nineteen theme was released with WordPress 5.0 and is pre-installed and active for new installations of WordPress. It quickly became one of the most popular themes, with over 1 million active installs.
The two reasons I choose the Twenty Nineteen theme are it was developed with a minimal, clean but sophisticated look and a mobile-first approach. It was developed with no sidebar. The lack of a traditional sidebar may be a shock to some, but the “Twenty Nineteen” pages are fully responsive so the clean look presents great on mobile devices.
The Twenty Nineteen theme features are:
- It was developed to be a fast and light theme with a basic, clean and fresh approach. This is created by using a sans-serif font – Segoe UI – for headings, widgets and post metadata, with a serif font – Hoefler Text – for body content.
- New features include the fixed background image, drop caps, color overlays and easy galleries.
- It is fully integrated with the Gutenberg block editor.
- There’s a plugin called Options for Twenty Nineteen which adds many customization options.
- In the Nav Options there is a slider to adjust the primary navigation link size.
- In the Layout Option are wide width and full width layout options for certain blocks.
- In the Color Option the default color is blue, hex color #0073aa.
- There are 3 menu Locations: Primary in the Header, Footer and Social Links.
- The Gutenberg editor displays content in the backend while creating it.
Be a Demo Warrior
The best tip for learning how to use a theme is “Watch Demos”! This tip is right up there with “Don’t Reinvent the Wheel” and “Steal Like an Artist”. Watch demos so you can see a feature you want to learn, learn it quickly, and start a wish list of features for your website. The drawback is only a few minutes of a long video may be useful to you. In this situation, I speed up the audio, use the slide bar to review the video, and multitask by watching the video while walking on a treadmill.