Parkside Baptist Church in Mesquite, TX uses WordPress. They used the Resolution Theme featured on this site a couple days ago. Resolution can be purchased for $35 from ThemeForest.net. A home page builder comes with the Resolution theme and Parkside made good use of the jQuery slider and the six content boxes for their home page.
Simplicity is a theme from WooThemes that can work well for churches. Today (12/20/2011) it’s 30% off and comes with an additional free bonus theme. The featured slider, custom post types, custom fonts, widgets and alternative styles are all helpful for church websites. If your ministry or church has a store you could also use the Simplicity WooCommerce Child Theme as well. On Thursday we’ll feature a church that used Simplicity for their website.
Studeo is a WordPress theme by PremiumPixels that is available through ThemeForest. It is designed to appeal to creative agencies and makes heavy use of images throughout the design. It comes with 4 custom widgets, a filterable portfolio and an easy color picker. A church not to far from where I call home used this theme in redesigning their church website. Thursday I’ll feature that site and you can see it used in a church context.
Mark Batterson is the lead pastor of National Community Church and an author of many best-selling books. His blog, which runs on WordPress, was recently redesigned by PlainJoe Studios and has a great look.
OrganizedThemes.com launched a new theme for churches called Authentic. It’s a simple theme with some great features for churches. Here’s the key list of features taken from their site:
Tim Hyde at ThemeLoom.com has released a new theme called Xi. Xi is developed as a fully responsive theme, able to adapt to different browser sizes and platforms. With Xi, your website would work on a laptop, tablet, or phone without changing themes. It responds to the changing window size in real time. Check out the screen shot here:
One of the things I love about WordPress is the multitude of themes and plugins available. The existence of multiple themes for Independence Day illustrates that. Here’s a free one from Motion Themes appropriately called 4th of July. Happy Independence Day to all of you in the U.S.!
The great team at 8bit released the Developer Theme this week. Below are some highlights about Developer Theme but I also wanted to let you know that all of 8bit’s themes are 25% this weekend. That includes Standard Theme, Live Theme, Photo Theme and the new Developer Theme.
A while back I tried to find a way to have a different WordPress theme on different pages within a WordPress website. The reason I needed it was because our church website design was great, but would not work as a blog because it’s designed to have everything on one page. Therefore, you want scrolling at a minimum which isn’t good for blogs. I wanted to have the page that showed the blog have a different theme but I couldn’t find anything that worked. To make it work I simply made the blog a separate site/blog within WordPress and themed it differently. You can see it here.
I recently wrapped up a similar design for a church and found a plugin that easily allowed me to use a different theme on different pages within WordPress. The plugin is fittingly called Page Theme. Once you install it you can find the settings under the Appearance section in the WP Admin. I love it because the user doesn’t have to go to a separate site within WordPress to update the blog.
UPDATE
In order to make this work in the way I mentioned (for a blog), you’ll have to modify the main theme’s single.php to use the blog theme’s single.php, while pointing to the blog theme’s header, footer & sidebar. I did this by copying header.php, footer.php, sidebar.php from the blog theme and putting them in the main theme as templates. So, they became header-blogtheme.php, footer-blogtheme.php, and sidebar-blogtheme.php and I changed the header to reference CSS and JS files from the blog theme folder. You can reference those specific templates but putting the name in the function call, like get_header(‘blogtheme’);
This is required because if not, when a user loads a single blog post it will revert back to the main theme. It’s extra work and I don’t love how much the core theme files have to be changed but it’s easier for the end-user if they don’t have a lot of WordPress experience.
