The previous Business Capital site was built in WordPress and not that long ago (a few years). But there have been such advances in WordPress over the past few years that a complete theme overhaul was more efficient—and effective—than a re-tweaking of the existing theme. Even (current) simple features such as widgetized sidebars and custom navigation were worth the new theme. But of course, while you’re at it, you might as well go all the way.

We looked at both StudioPress themes as well as WOO Themes, but finally StudioPress won out on mostly design and layout features. StudioPress packs a punch of power with just their widgets. For example, we’re using both the Featured Page and Featured Posts widgets in different ways to display the variety of content (and images) in different places and in different ways. We took it a step further and “widgetized” a few of the pages (see Resource Center and Get Connected) so that we could more easily drag and drop widgets into a field rather than something like building a three-column page template that’s going to break if you don’t have the code or HTML just right.

We could have built a three-column page, but chose to widgetize a page (with three columns of widgets) to unleash the power of StudioPress (and any other) widgets available

We also used the portfolio template to get the Representative Transactions to a point where Business Capital only has to add a new portfolio item (title, body, and featured image) and automagically a new item is added to the collection on the page, already formatted with image, size and spacing as well as a custom footer image. We added a few custom fields in there so we could add certain data to certain places, then pulled it into the template to show up where it belongs. All BizCap has to do is plug in the numbers into the right fields.

We also removed the previous drop-down menus to improve the SEO of the site. With so many links pointing to so many pages from so many pages, the important pages struggle to stand out. We strategically chose which pages were the most important for the firm’s search terms and built the navigation menus accordingly.

We used the Simple Sidebars plugin to make it easy to manage different sidebars on different pages, posts, and categories. They have full control of what goes where and can manage it all in the sidebars, menus, and widgets. It’s all there in the WP admin.

One last tidbit. I like WOO themes because they have built-in shortcodes, so we added the Styles for Shortcodes plugin to, for example, create columns, blockquotes, and my favorite: pull quotes. Pull quotes are the ones that act like a “text box” in that regular text is wrapped around it. We then customized those (which is very easy to do right there in the admin) to stylize them to match BizCap’s color scheme. We started using it so much we called the little icon “Super S” and we’re all thrilled with the muscle packed into a plugin.

Have a look at the Business Capital site. Hope you like it as much as they do.

Before

After