studiopress enterprise theme customization for wordpress

I have been working in the graphics industry since November 1997 (that makes me feel old now) so it’s been 13 years. I didn’t start doing web design until 2006-7, why I waited 10 years I will never know. Since I have gotten into designing and customizing sites I have found a whole new world of love for designing and customizing. I won’t necessarily say its easier, because the coding part can truly be a headache from time to time, but the design element is, there don’t seem to be as many rules to follow like there are in print, any resolution from 72dpi up is suitable for web applications and as long as you can translate inches to pixels everything else seems to be a snap.

My discovery of WordPress

In June 2009 I was hired to be the communications manager of a local theater in Murfreesboro, TN. Until this point all my websites had been created using Dreamweaver (which ps I still have a great love for and use constantly) but I was introduced to my very first WordPress Website… Since then I have started creating and customizing WordPress sites pretty much exclusively (for my web work). I love the ease of the templates and how utterly customizable they are, if you understand even the tiniest bit of HTML and CSS you’ve got it made.

streamline theme customization for wordpress

I’ll admit the first month I worked in WordPress I was a little overwhelmed and even confused at times, but the more I sunk my teeth in, the more I understood.

My favorite template designers

Studiopress by far is my favorite theme designers for WordPress. Their logic and building process is second to none. There themes are incredibly clean, highly extensible and ready for any customization you can throw at them. Not to mention their support forum is UNBELIEVABLE, if I post a question it usually only takes 30 minutes before I get a response (or less, and thats even in the middle of the night!!! WOW!)
Studiopress recently stopped creating their “classic” themes and have replaced them with Genesis and “Child Themes”. What I love about the new parent/child themes is that they have even more options available to them, you can load the parent theme and get certain things set, then add the child theme and set even more. My favorite child themes include; Streamline, Agentpress, Lifestyle (ps that is the theme for this site), Serenity, and Enterprise. With their Pro-Plus membership you get all the themes FOREVER! That’s right one payment and updates, upgrades, new themes and amazing support FOREVER!!!

Lifestyle (classic) WP Theme customization, theme by Studiopress

If you can type a word document, you can manipulate WordPress

After the initial customization and layout of a wordpress site, the client can usually take over from there! That is an amazing FEATURE. More and more in this economy people want to economize and cut spending, one of the first things they cut is their advertising and web presence. The web guru is the first to go from the payroll. Well you can combat this by utilizing word press, selling the design and layout and offering a basic training on how to create pages and posts, upload images and other media, once you’ve done the hard part (smirk) you can turn it over to your client. Design and layout take probably 1/8th of the time that a traditional static site takes to create and layout, so you can lower your prices to fit your clients budget. For me that meant 8X as much work as I was getting in the past. When it took me over a month to create ONE STATIC site, now I can do 4-8 WP Sites a week (I am actually making more money this way too and not getting bored looking at the same site over and over and over again). There is no sacrifice to quality, your just adding quantity and value to your services.

executive theme customization for wordpress (theme by studiopress)

More often than not though, my clients will ask me to keep their maintenance and even create posts from content they provide me. For a small monthly fee I will gladly abide. Since creating a post can take as little as 5 minutes to create I figure I am making out in the deal.

WP Site Customizations

Typically for a basic WP Site Customization a client will receive:

• Use of a premium Studiopress Theme ($49 value)
• Custom Header
• Custom Site Colors/navigation
• Custom Favicon
• Setup of initial pages/posts/widgets
• Basic SEO optimization
• 1-hour WP Training

Add on Services include:

• basic 1 page Facebook Fan Page design based on their new website look/feel
• basic twitter/youtube skins
• additional WP training as needed
• Monthly maintenance packages
• Advanced SEO optimization
• Premium graphics/logos and print media to correlate with site design