Did you look at the template on a mobile phone?

My previous blog post about responsive design goes into a lot more detail about why websites look very different depending on the device being used to view them. One of the most common behind the scenes tasks I do is to make sure headings, photos and page flow work when viewed on a mobile phone. Good templates use good responsive design coding, but there are far too many bad templates that ignore what font size and spacing might look like on mobile phones. If you had a template that used 40 px for header font sizes, would you know how to change that to be smaller for a mobile view? Would you understand the difference between an H1 or an H2 type of header and the importance of having only one H1 on a post or page? I like to use font sizes that can stay the same regardless of view port size for simplicity, but most templates don’t. For mobile, I may keep body text at 16 px but tighten up the spacing between lines.

What are hex codes and why do they matter?

Do you want button colors that match your logo on your website? If you do, then you need to know how to find that color match, how to use a web safe color value for it, and how to change the button background color, font color and border. Hex codes are the web safe value that you assign to colored backgrounds in various parts of a website. The look something like #FFFFF (the hex value of white). If you have a professional graphic designer create a brand book for you, then they will tell you different color values for the colors used in your logo. Some of those values will be for printed materials and some of them will be for online use. You’ll need to figure out what each of them means and where to use them in your marketing materials.

You deserve custom work.

I’m not going to insult you and say that you couldn’t figure out how to do all of the nuanced things that happen to make a website ready to use. You could learn how to make a plug and play template work for you, but even if you can do you really WANT to? I love what I do and I love all of the elements that go into making a professional looking website shine. Very few of my clients share my love of website geekery. I use words like hex code, DNS, recaptcha, tags, hyperlinks, etc. and their eyes tend to glaze over. It is the same reaction I have when a chef talks about the smoke point of oils, or a construction pro talks about PVP pipe or drill bits. I can cook and drill and do handiwork, but it is never going to be a gourmet meal or a perfect join. When I want something my way and done right, I hire someone who lives that work every day. A task that would take me hours to complete and several trips to the hardware store for supplies or special equipment would take them half the time and a fraction of the frustration. Don’t put yourself through the stress of trying to use some one-size fits all solution. If you are like my clients, you will want changes, you will want tweaks and you will want it to be professional and fully functional.

Templates can be a great starting point for a WordPress site, but be prepared for them to be more complicated than just a plug and play solution as some companies may claim. Your company is not a cookie cutter enterprise. Your website shouldn’t be cookie cutter either. You should be prepared to make a lot of little tweaks and changes, some of which may require looking at the back end and understanding web technology, maybe even a little bit of HTML code. If that sounds daunting to you, let me be your expert instead. Let’s chat.