Lauren Deane of Good Looking Ideas wanted a site that she could update herself but didn’t sacrifice design style. In fact, she wanted a site that didn’t sacrifice anything.
We worked together scouring ThemeForest for a theme that would not only be beautiful (what Lauren wanted) but would also work well behind the scenes (what Bradley wanted). Because Lauren and I have worked together on several WordPress sites, I also wanted her to see what a good theme was made of behind the scenes. A good theme that would automatically create thumbnails of her images on the fly and to multiple specifications so that she would only upload an image once and it would be used in several places–all magically automatically.
We went through many, many themes, even bought a few and really test drove them. But she thought it didn’t look quite right or I found that behind the scenes it wasn’t working as well as I wanted it to. Finally, we found the theme for her that even had some extra features (pop-up video, for example) that really worked.
While we were at it, we also set up her with Google Apps email so Google hosts her email (hername@herdomain.com) and she gets the benefit of fantastic spam filters, speedy service, and best of all: excellent integration with her iPhone (calendar, contacts, and email).
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“We went through many, many themes, even bought a few…” really resinates. Theme evaluation is a job in itself. Good Looking Ideas looks good!
Lauren’s site is super good looking. Naturally.
Great stuff on both your parts.