Product Review Theme Suggestions???

[bulldawg24]

I run a website that specializes in product reviews.  I'm currently running elegant themes, but have heard great things about the studiopress platform and am considering overhauling the website.  I've looked through all of the themes and have been unable to find anything similar; however, I'm open to the possibility of completely reformatting the site.  Does anybody have any suggestions in terms of studiopress themes I could use?  Any examples out there on the web?

One reason I ask is because I have a couple other sites that I'm starting, and I don't like the idea of running different themes on all the sites, while paying an annual membership for access to the theme portfolio.  I would much rather purchase a theme and become an expert at it.  I'm new to web design, so don't laugh at my site 🙂  Any other suggestions anyone has would be greatly appreciated as well!

Thanks,

Scott

The url is http://www.headlightreviews.com

[David Chu]

Hi!

Welcome.  Your site looks pretty nice!  I do see that it's not a responsive theme, although Elegant may have an update for that.

I have a history with Elegant themes.  They are very pretty, and given the excellent price, I thought, OK, I'll subscribe and have loads of tricked-out themes to offer to clients.  As it happens, it never panned out that way (the great majority of my work is custom themes).  Also, I was very unimpressed with their support, blogged about it, and I still get comments from people who are also having support woes.

Given that your theme is a gallery theme, I'm wondering if Modern Portfolio or Pretty Pictures might work for that.  Both are very clean designs, and could easily be styled for different tastes.  The only concern that comes to mind is that if your reviews are Custom Post Types (many such things are!), some custom programming may be needed to get them displayed.  A normal WP theme is set up for Posts for the most part when they do this type of display nowadays.  Some plugins use Posts and other use Custom Post Types to get more specific functionality and features.

Dave

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Dave Chu · Custom WordPress Developer – likes collaborating with Designers

[bulldawg24]

Dave,

Thank you for the thoughtful response. To be honest, I am not married to the current layout of my website. In fact, most people who come to the website come directly to one of my reviews as opposed to my homepage. So, I don't know how beneficial it is for me to have that layout on the homepage. In addition, I probably have some of the same frustrations with elegant themes that you and your clients Had. So, I'm on the hunt for a Theme that I can use in its place. Have you found any of these To be particularly useful? Are there some that comes loaded with more features than others? With elegant themes I could download them and take a look prior to installing them permanently, but with studio press I want to make sure I purchase the correct Theme

 

Thanks again for all your help.

Scott

 

[David Chu]

Scott,

The "Loaded with features" part puts a different spin on the question.   Genesis themes do have standard admin features.  Some of them have extra admin panels for design features and so on.

There are, broadly speaking, two types of people who use theme frameworks and premium themes: those like me, who develop from scratch and can customize the smallest part of a theme without flinching, vs. those who don't want to touch PHP or CSS and rely on admin panels for all their site building.  The latter type of person might find Genesis admin panels a little spartan, but would get excited by seeing the enormous admin panels you'd get in some Themeforest themes, for instance.  I like them lean and mean, and with a lot of great programming hooks.  Of course, I don't know where you fall in this spectrum.

Also, because I do so much custom work, I don't know all of the Genesis themes' innards - I generally just start with the framework alone and go from there.  So I can't really answer your question, exactly.  Maybe someone who owns all the Genesis themes can comment on a particular theme's features.

Dave

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Dave Chu · Custom WordPress Developer – likes collaborating with Designers

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