- design ALL the pages of your website – do not leave anything open to interpretation;
- design User Experience actions as well, such as pop-ups when certain actions are performed;
- if you are going to use Premium Theme, be sure to follow its existing structure as much as possible when designing. Straying away too much from it creates big difficulties when coding, and since you would be doing so, you might as well choose a different theme that matches your design more closely;
- Tip: do not get carried away and become a marketing victim of “eye-candy” themes. Choose a robust one, with great reviews. You do not need a gazillion options with a theme. The simpler the better.
- create your designs for Desktop, Tablet and Phone views, each for all pages;
- if no designs are provided for Tablet and Phone views, then the default responsiveness of the chosen grid system will be used instead, with standard mobile User Interface elements (such as a hamburger navigation menu for example);
- decide on your media query break points and be consistent with them throughout your entire design;
- use a grid system (such as Bootstrap) when creating your designs and be consistent with it;
- if you wish to use any Plugins in order to develop the website functionality, include their User Interface elements in your designs and style them up accordingly. Please note that changing the layout of a plugin User Interface usually results in higher development time;
- Tip: in order to save development hours, once you decided upon a plugin to use for your website’s functionality, try and keep as much of it’s User Interface layout and possible;
- be consistent with your Typography and color scheme;
- write up documentation on any User Experience aspects (visitor interactions with the website); these will be very helpful when coding the website.
- Tip: there are plenty of tools one could use for this, our favorite being www.invisionapp.com;
- if none provided, standard User Experience models will be used instead
- specify if there is any content apart from Posts and pages that you would like to manage in the same manner (i.e. manage that content from a menu item in the dashboard)
- specify if you would like to use a Page Builder plugin, WordPress Page Templates or ShortCodes in order to build the design layout.
WordPress Theme design tips
Added on Thursday, April 6th, 2017 - 10:34