Home page features an elegant, mobile-friendly slideshow.
The Challenge
Jessie Jiang New York needed a portal to attract premium American brands to their Chinese shop on Alibaba. It needed to be slick and engaging, but fast loading for visitors who would mostly be accessing the site on their phones.
The client found a paid theme that they really liked but had trouble converting the demo site to their content.
The Solution
We eliminated the slow-load times and glitches caused by the theme slider by recreating the visual aspects of the slider using CSS animation.
We built a scalable video library using categories and simple thumbnail links which provided the added benefit of reducing page load time.
The final result is an attractive, interactive website with fast-loading pages to allow visitors to focus on the content not the technology.
Key Successes and What You Can Learn
A prebuilt theme is a good shortcut – if you choose the right theme.
The idea of buying an attractive theme and dropping in your own content is enticing. But it doesn’t always work as expected.
The advantage is you can bypass much of the design process by finding a theme that you like with fonts, colors and layout that match your vision.
The problem is that these themes include many filler elements that you ultimately don’t need or even want. Often, this creates the trap of creating content to fill these spaces rather than creating content that fulfills your readers’ needs.
When you are evaluating pre-built themes, here’s what you would be looking for:
- Good support. Themes, and the platform they are built on, need to play together nicely. As technology changes, the theme needs to keep pace. If there is an issue you’ll need to be able to contact the theme developer to help you address the problem.
- Clean code. This can be hard to evaluate but make sure that the theme you’re buying does not include a lot of bloated code that will slow down your site.
- Elements based on YOUR content. Think first about the content you want to include on your site. Then look at themes that allow you to add those elements in an attractive, logical way.
Are you looking for a new look for your website? Contact us to see how we can help.