Let me tell you a story about how I met your…
Ok, just kidding.
Do let me tell you the story about how we got to the idea behind our themes and why.
Meet a new way to build your WordPress site.
It’s a known fact that WordPress offers you to create many kinds of content types. The most famous being posts and pages. Since WordPress stopped being just a blog platform (we’re talking many years ago) to become one of the most used site building platforms, pages became more and more protagonist.
During these years different theme and plugin creators started to look for ways users could build more complex pages than what the native WordPress editor allowed them to.
It means, tools that would give those users that aren’t necessarily developers, the possibility to create different layouts to enhance the content presentation of those pages.
Pages that will sell a product, showcase work projects, tell a story, present a brand, make you contact a business, subscribe to a mailing list, join a program.
So how can a WordPress theme help site creators achieve all those kinds of different pages?
In 2012, here at Artisan Themes, we started to think about that. We knew the limits of having an empty page editor when facing a new website project. At the time, many themes and plugins came with shortcodes such as toggles, columns, accordions, and although those were all great, that didn’t seem like enough for doing whatever we wanted to do on a page.
We thought there should be a way to create a page that will look as awesome as many modern websites of famous brands started to look like. But we also felt like that tool should work with the same logic as WordPress does.
It couldn’t be a totally strange body inserted into a WordPress page editor.
There must be a WordPress logical way to do it
Then it hit us. If websites are made of different pages, then pages are made of different kinds of sections, one above the other.
And if WordPress worked with a “post” logic behind, where you create a post and then you can call that post wherever you want and as many times as you want through a template file, then our tool should do that too.
We called those sections Modules. And we developed a custom post type for them.
That’s how our second theme, Nayma, was born: a theme that’ll let you create separate modules that you can later on place and arrange inside your pages. As you wish and in unlimited ways.
So we had the main building functionality, the logic behind our themes. But that’s not all. Modules would also have to be prepared for different types of content and be able to let you customize their styles.
Now we had a winner: more than 20 pre-made modules for different content purposes (testimonials, portfolio, team, slider, blog, carousel, pricing tables, slogan, gallery, video, etc.) that you can create with, customize, style up, and add to your pages as many times as you want, in the order you want.
That’s what we call “a modular way”
I’ll admit the idea we had, that we can now express clearly, wasn’t so easy to explain to potencial clients at that time. While other themes started to integrate page builder plugins or other types of page building tools, they didn’t work quite exactly the way our themes worked.
Customers got so positively surprised of how intuitive and easy was to build a good looking WordPress site with our modular system. So why couldn’t we explain it better?
Over the years and as we kept improving our modular system and the modules possibilities, we worked towards explaining this functionality and its benefits better.
This video was one of the results of that process:
I can say now, with the launch of our new website a few months ago, that we’re in that place.
See the modular building in action
All the pages you see in our themes’ demos and Ready Made Sites are created that way.
It really gets as easy as shown in this video:
Wanna try it yourself?
I really like telling our story, but enough of that. You can try improving the way you build WordPress sites by yourself by getting one of our themes or by downloading our new and free Pepper theme.
Photo credits: Gratisography