Welcome to Minimul WordPress theme
This hand crafted, bloat-free, minimal and elegant theme was designed specifically for several key features. You can set your portfolio, blog or the custom home page to be your front page in WordPress so that you can target your aaudience accordingly. My project outline when starting development / design was to meet the following requirements / targets:
- A personal website to offer your services / abilities / resume.
- An ultra clean and usable portfolio website.
- A superb blog experience with major focus on content and readability.
- Customize everything to your own look and feel – easily!
- Bloat-Free and plugin powered.
- Great SEO support using semantic formatting and headings.
Portfolio Pages
The portfolio section is masonry powered and filtered via categories so that you may offer a filterable index with all portfolio items, or alternatively split your portfolio in to categories and give them their own unique pages and menu items. I wanted maximum impact for the portfolio index pages and so they are full width. They will neatly arrange featured images if all the same size in a grid format, or alternatively upload portrait and landscape sized images and it will neatly stack them in a masonry format – no need to choose anything for this, it’s automatic. Single portfolio pages are 100% pure content. This gives you the freedom to lay things out however you wish and the specific project information is displayed towards the bottom of the page.
Blog Index
Blog pages are displayed using a golden ratio format for width, font size and line height. This gives the best reading experience for your users. The blog also supports many of the popular Post Formats such as standard, gallery, link, quote, video embeds, video playlists, audio embeds and audio playlists all using the new built-in functions of WordPress without the need for plugins. Featured images enjoy a prominent wider format at the top of your posts if set and the super clean comments will encourage engagement with your audience. Long format articles are also catered for using page breaks so that you can spread your article over multiple pages with automatic page pagination.
Dedicated Home Page
The dedicated home page template has a bold clean header with a dedicated widget area so that you can add any content such as in the live demo, or you could add a carousel, slider, video, form – pretty much anything. The content for the page is displayed under the header so you have full freedom for anything you wish. The home page is also a wide format compared to blog pages etc to give strong impact to visitors landing on your site.
Plugin Powered
As a major advocate for removing specific functionality away from themes we have been on a mission in the past 6 months to create, maintain and expand our range of 100% free, GPL licensed plugins and not include the functions in to the themes themselves. This is because having built-in custom post types, meta boxes etc. should be powered by plugins, not a theme, as per WordPress standards and to best serve our users. This means if you swap themes in the future, your data is safe and not lost. Something everyone can appreciate.
The following custom plugins are produced, maintained and supported by us:
- Cr3ativ Carousel
- Cr3ativ Portfolio
- Cr3ativ Post Carousel
- Cr3ativ Shortcodes
Bloat-Free
We don’t build on a framework of multiple CSS files that are frustrating and bloated. We write each line of CSS and code in our themes, which means they are easier to edit and customize, load quicker and produce less strain on your server and provide better experience for you and your visitors.
Colors, Images or Patterns
Being able to choose your colors is always a good thing to help strengthen your brand. Some go too far with options. Some users get overwhelmed with options. In principle giving you absolute freedom for customization sounds great, in practice in falls on it’s face and just causes frustration. We develop with the user in mind, so when it comes to options we prefer to think about how you will use it, then design and offer options around that. We group elements together, based on the original design, so that rather than 30 color pickers, you get a more manageable 5. Elements share the same colors in the original design, because they look correct. Now when you alter your colors, you don’t have a mind meltdown trying to work things out.
It’s the same with image / pattern uploads. Rather than having separate image backgrounds, then separate pattern uploads, then how do those patterns repeat, or what if we just want a single color, we go the easier route. 3 sections required focus. The pop-out sidebar, the menu control button area and the body. We provide the following for those sections:
- Color Picker (used as a fallback if an image / pattern is not chosen).
- Image Upload (can be a big image or repeatable image.
- Image Repeat (choose repeat, repeat x or repeat y)
With these options, plus the color pickers for your content you’ve got everything covered. Simple, elegant and powerful. That’s how we like to roll.
The Options
Our rock-solid theme options based on the very popular OptionTree framework enables you to upload and set your logo, your fav icon, your ‘Read More’ text output, Google Analytics tracking code snippet, custom CSS, and copyright message.
Retina Ready
Although the full design is 100% image free. We load retina.js to automatically serve retina sized images if you desire. All icons used in the theme are font based scaling perfectly to any size and looking sharp on any device.
Responsive and Fluid
The design is fluid for the most part with break points for popular screen sizes to ensure correct font sizing, spacing and line heights, meaning you look awesome on all devices and screen sizes from the largest monitors to the smallest smartphone screens.
The pop-out menu and sidebar doesn’t alter in orientation depending on the device to ensure a consistent experience across all platforms. It also holds your widgets if you wish to use any, such as, your social icons, links, recent posts, calendar or even a carousel or video.
Theme Features
- Bloat-Free Theme
- HTML5 and CSS3 construction (heavily commented)
- XML Preview Data file included for import
- Translation ready with mo/po files supplied
- WPML ready
- Fully Responsive Design
- SEO Best Practice Coding
- Full featured theme options panel
- Fully working contact form page with validation (Contact Form 7 plugin)
- Automatic lightbox for linked images
- Retina Ready with built-in Retina.js
- Full suite of Page Templates:
- Dedicated Home Page
- Automatic Site Map Page
- Dedicated 404 Error Page
- Portfolio Index – Filterable
- Portfolio Single
- Blog Index / Category / Archive Page
- Blog Single Page
- Paginated Comments
- Paginated Posts for long articles
- Create and display text, image or any other content swipe enabled, responsive carousels in pages, posts or widget areas
- Responsive videos, buttons, icon buttons, google maps, toggles, tabs and more via our short codes plugin
- Multi-Track WordPress powered Audio player
- Multi-Track WordPress powered Video player
- 16 Layered PSD Files
- Support proudly supplied for installation issues / but not for customization (available at cost)
Updates
- Release on 5/29/14 – Initial Release.
