WordPress Theme Design Archives

WordCamp Minneapolis 2016: A Focus On Intention

May 2, 2016 Brian Bourn

WordCamp Minneapolis, happening May 21-22, 2016 at the University of Minnesota Humphrey School of Public Affairs, is focused around the idea of intention and that our best work is always done when we have a sense of the greater purpose behind it.

With this theme in mind, many of the sessions will explore the reasons why we do things — whether that’s in development, design, content, teaching, learning, or strategy.

Bourn Creative’s own Jennifer Bourn will be speaking at WordCamp Minneapolis about The Path to Conversion, specifically on designing WordPress themes with intention so they support the clients’ goals, position them in the marketplace, help tell their brand story, and naturally guide visitors to take the desired action.

Most discussions and talks on WordPress theming are focused on development, but to write the code for and develop a WordPress theme, you first need design.

Web design plays a critical role in setting the tone of a website, focusing visitors’ attention, and guiding them through the site to a conversion with as little friction as possible. It also is responsible for shaping brand perception, audience emotion, and telling a story that not only produces results but resonates with clients and customers.

Google Drew A Line In The Sand: Your Site Better Be Responsive (Mobile-Friendly)

March 18, 2015 Jennifer Bourn

The gauntlet has been thrown. On February 26, 2015, Google affirmed their position on the importance of mobile-friendliness and it’s affect on your mobile search rankings.

Google originally warned us of this change back in November in the post Helping users find mobile-friendly pages, on their Webmaster Central Blog.

In the post, they point out how terrible the experience is when visiting a non-mobile site on a mobile device and you have to pinch and zoom and scroll sideways to see the all of the content, or you can’t click any of the tiny links or menu items with your gigantic fingers.

We began to see hints of this coming back in November 2014, when mobile search results began displaying a “mobile-friendly” label in their search results — and we saw it displayed on our own listed in mobile search results.

A Rebrand, A Redesign, And A Vision For The Future

November 3, 2014 Jennifer Bourn

Let’s just get it out there — I never loved our logo.

The copyediting concept was just a quick idea and great play on our name that Brian came up with when filing our business paperwork. I mocked it up and went with it to get the business off the ground, never intending to keep it. But everyone we met loved it. People raved about it at conferences and networking events when they asked for my card, they raved about it when calling about new projects, and over time, it just stuck.

For the first several years Bourn Creative existed, I was by myself. The colorful rainbow branding we’ve had for years evolved out of my love of color and my desire for something other than the logo to represent me, because at the time, I was the business. I loved the color, the positive feedback, and the praise we received from others about how much they loved it.

Then Brian joined Bourn Creative and took over the company as CEO and all WordPress development, and the brand had to evolve. It didn’t represent a company, but me and my freelance history. So we redesigned the Bourn Creative site, simplifying the rainbows. And about 18 months later, we did it again to “man up” the brand even more. But…

How To Remove The Genesis Blog and Archive Page Templates

April 19, 2014 Brian Bourn

With the recent release of WordPress 3.9, several new features for theme developers were introduced to further enhance what can be baked into new WordPress themes. Devin Price has a great post over at wptheming highlighting many of the new features. The inspiration for the Genesis specific filter below came from his post.

One reason we design and build WordPress themes on the Genesis Framework is the nature in which it is built. With Genesis, I have the ability to add, filter, or remove almost everything.

Up until WordPress 3.9, the Genesis blog and archive page templates were inherited by child themes and there wasn’t a simple way to remove them. Why does this matter? When we build custom child themes for clients, we use a variety functions to remove every unnecessary item and option from Genesis to create a simplified and focused back-end for our clients.

Customizing the Genesis 2.0 HTML5 Comment Form

September 9, 2013 Brian Bourn

Now that Genesis 2.0 has been shipped, we are building all of our custom child themes with the new HTML5 markup enabled — and absolutely love the new code base.

On a recent project the design specs called for a customized comment form. I have several code snippets saved for this occasion, but Genesis 2.0 child themes with HTML5 enabled use the native WordPress comment form, instead of the older comment form built into Genesis — so the code snippets I had no longer worked.

This is well documented within Genesis at /lib/structure/comments.php, which shows how older XHTML child themes will use the Genesis comment form for backwards compatibility, and child themes with HTML5 enabled will use the native WordPress comment form.

Customize Your WordPress More Tag Link Text

March 23, 2011 Jennifer Bourn

Yesterday I wrote about the WordPress More Tag, how to use it, and why the More Tag is so important for blogging success. While I shared some of the ways using the WordPress More Tag can improve your blog, I didn’t share one of the coolest features about the More Tag.

One of the more awesome features that comes with the use of the More Tag is the ability to customize the link text that the More tag adds to the end of your blog post excerpt. You can choose to have it say read more, more, read the full article, or anything else you want. Even better, you have the ability to customize the More Tag link text for each individual blog post — but you have to be in HTML view.

After you have written your content, inserted the More Tag to your post, and switched over to the WordPress HTML editor, look for this code:

Why Use The Powerful and Often-Forgotten WordPress More Tag

March 22, 2011 Jennifer Bourn

The More Tag is a crucial tool for WordPress blogging success, and yet over and over I see bloggers forget to use it The More Tag (only available for posts) is a tag that gets inserted into your blog post content to truncate blog entries so that only the first part of posts is shown on your main blog page and archive pages. When you insert the More Tag, a link will be placed directly after your excerpt, pointing the reader to the full content of the article.

You can find the More Tag button in the first row of the WordPress visual editor toolbar:

And in the WordPress HTML editor toolbar: