Any recommendations WP responsive themes.

[Young Recruit]

Hey everyone.

Can anyone recommend the above?

Occasionally I need to find themes.
Looking for modern, reliable, responsive designs. Don't mind paying for premium.

Any suggestions?

Thanks in advance.

 

[OldWelshGuy]

there are loads. what niche what style etc? Elegance have some nice themes, but I have yet to find a theme that didn't need some work on it behind the scenes.

 

[fisicx]

Pretty much everything on themeforest is responsive.

But....

Most of them as (OWG) suggests need work. The problem seems to be users, they don't have brains anymore which means you end up with themes stuffed full of features that get in the way of building an effective website.

I just build my own themes these days, much easier to than unwravelling some WYSIWYG moster.

 

[Faevilangel]

I buy most of mine from Themeforest but you do need to find a diamond in the rough, ignore the "multi-purpose" themes and go for a industry specific theme.

I have bought around 100 themes from there and only 1 was that poor I got a refund

Like Fisiscx I mostly create my own custom themes but not every client wants to pay for that so I sometimes have to buy themes and customise them.

 

[Young Recruit]

Thanks guys.

What kind of issues do you refer to that 'of the shelf' themes can cause?

 

[OldWelshGuy]

Mostly bad code and code bloat, but normally there are things that I want done differently, the emphasis (as mentioned by fisx) is style over substance, and often the pizazz gets in the way of the call to action that is the reason a website exists.

A site isn't there to look pretty, make people smile, surprise them etc. it is there to convert them. YES, all the tings mentioned previously can help to convert but UNLESS they do, they have no place on the site.

 

[fisicx]

Look at the Avada theme. Hugely popular with zillions of features but useless if you actually want the site to convert. It looks pretty but is about as much use as a chocolate teapot.

Caveat: it looks pretty on a computer but is pants on a mobile phone.

 

[UKSBD]

The problem with themes (client work)

Is people see a theme they really like, whereas what they really like are the images/graphics used on the theme, strip all the images of it and show the blank canvas or a version with their images and they then say, oh that's not what I expected.

People tend to have little idea of the importance of good images and think a good theme overcomes it.

 

[Will Blears]

As FaevilAngel mentioned Themes Forest is an excellent resource, another more unknown theme company is mythemeshop - they don't have as many themes as Theme Forest due to the fact that it's all done in house, however I must admit there themes from a usability and SEO perspective seem excellent.

If you do go ahead and buy from mythemeshop, be sure to Google for coupons as they are constantly running promotions.

 

[Young Recruit]

Most of the themes have annoying sliders and fading / moving parts.

I'm just looking for a layout that has a homepage with full width image with CTA(s) in the middle and then the option to have widget boxes below the image that can be arranged next to each other and are clearly visible above the fold.

 

[Will Blears]

I understand your struggle, I've spent hours searching for themes - sometimes you need to be a little more open minded when looking at the themes though as it's not always possible to get what you want straight away. I have often hired web developers to make simple tweaks to a theme to ensure I am able to get exactly what I want.

 

[fisicx]

I'm just looking for a layout that has a homepage with full width image with CTA(s) in the middle and then the option to have widget boxes below the image that can be arranged next to each other and are clearly visible above the fold.

But any theme can do this, all you need is a bit of CSS on the homepage. Note however you can't keep all this above the fold on a mobile - which is what just about everyone forgets.

And full width images with a CTA in the middle are popular but don't convert at all well.

 

[Nuno]

Most of the themes have annoying sliders and fading / moving parts.

I'm just looking for a layout that has a homepage with full width image with CTA(s) in the middle and then the option to have widget boxes below the image that can be arranged next to each other and are clearly visible above the fold.

Enfold from Theme Forest has been mentioned here before. It is a build your own framework with a (bloody) Layerslider, WP Layer I think, but the slider can be removed totally.

 

[ZeroDouble]

Most of the themes have annoying sliders and fading / moving parts.

I'm just looking for a layout that has a homepage with full width image with CTA(s) in the middle and then the option to have widget boxes below the image that can be arranged next to each other and are clearly visible above the fold.

Sounds like the 'North' theme from theme forest will do exactly what you want. If you use the backend visual composer you can customise it to look pretty much how you like.

http://themeforest.net/item/north-one-page-parallax-wordpress-theme/8454561

The only thing with it (that I've found) is that it has an annoying bit of code that adds the site name to your title tag, but it's simple to remove the relevant bit of PHP from the header template. If you get it, PM me and I'll tell you what to remove.

Hope it helps.

 

[Faevilangel]

Or use an seo plugin and you can overwrite the title tags from each page

 

[ZeroDouble]

Or use an seo plugin and you can overwrite the title tags from each page

Tried that with both Yoast and the Matthew Torbet one - it didn't work, and still left the site name appended on the end for whatever reason.

I remove the PHP in addition to using a plugin.

 

[Faevilangel]

That means they have coded the title tag wrong then, it should be

<?php wp_title(); ?>

or use the new title_tag support (http://codex.wordpress.org/Title_Tag)

They shouldn't be coding anything else as it limits what the user can do to the title

 

[ZeroDouble]

That means they have coded the title tag wrong then, it should be

<?php wp_title(); ?>

or use the new title_tag support (http://codex.wordpress.org/Title_Tag)

They shouldn't be coding anything else as it limits what the user can do to the title

Yea, they had it coded as;

<?php wp_title('|', true, 'right'); ?><?php bloginfo('name'); ?>

So I changed it as you've outlined above.