We found a beauty of a slider in a theme that changed from color to black & white on hover! Woo!

Oh, the rest of the theme doesn’t work so well? Oh, ahem, yes, well … let’s ditch it then.

Here’s a close-up screenshot of the cool slider from the theme. Does a great job over a hover-over effect from black and white to color. Very cool. But the rest of the theme was too difficult to, well, do much of anything. Even trying to build the navigation wasn’t working.

[quote]When is switching themes worth it? What’s the math? What are the upsides and downsides? [/quote]

I made an executive decision and decided to stop fiddling and futzing with the theme I didn’t know (and apparently not many others as the theme wasn’t very well supported … imagine!) and get back to a supported theme that I knew would work and, hold on, be a longer-term strategic benefit to the client. Because keep in mind, once this theme is in the hands of the client, they are the ones who need to know how it works and even more important: that it works. This other theme with the fancy slider was a one-trick pony: it had a pretty slider. But that was it. It couldn’t trot, run, gallop or even walk.

Moral of the story? When is $66 more like $666?

Original slider from theme.

Original slider from theme.

So I shopped around and found a third-party accordion slider that did just about the same thing. Did it do everything the first slider did? No. But it worked.

3rd party slider found on Code Canyon.

3rd party slider found on Code Canyon.

Finally the site, now built in Canvas with the accordion slider from Code Canyon. The accordion isn’t all that easy to edit, but at least we don’t need to edit the slider very often. The rest of the site is built with a powerful theme that we can easily update, upgrade, configure to our heart’s content.

Great slider idea to bring photos from black and white to color ... but the rest of the theme was difficult to use.

Great slider idea to bring photos from black and white to color … but the rest of the theme was difficult to use.