A few of you may have been wondering where I had disappeared. Sorry about that. February was not a good month for our family, as we had various illnesses including strep throat, colds, and migraines.
Despite the chaos of illnesses, I’ve been quietly working behind the scenes to develop Standout Professional, so that I could promote my web design services. The site is not quite finished yet, and I’m waiting on a new logo, but I thought it’s better to get it out now rather than wait until everything is perfect. You’ll notice that my specialty is the health industry, but if you have a website that you’d like me to design (or redesign) for you that is not health-related, by all means, just ask me.
You’ll notice that The Online Chick and Standout Professional are built using the Genesis Framework and the Dynamik Child Theme.
For those of you who have been around since the inception of this blog, you know that it has undergone a few makeovers. The most recent makeover had been using one of the Elegant Themes. I was contacted by someone who was wondering why I’m not using or recommending Elegant Themes anymore, so I’ll explain that and why I’ve switched themes.
- Prior to using Elegant Themes, I used a free theme. It was very easy to use and install. Any time I updated wordpress, things worked fine. The main reason I decided to make the switch to a new, paid theme was because I felt that particular free theme looked outdated. If you don’t know what I mean by outdated, just compare various sites across the web, and you’ll start to understand what I mean.
- I decided to make the switch to Elegant Themes, because I was already a member of theirs as I was using their themes on a couple other websites. You get free theme updates for the whole year that you are a member. After that year is up, you have to pay for another year of membership, including theme updates. I didn’t really have any problems with paying a yearly fee, as I felt it was fair considering they do give good support and I understand that it costs them money to keep things up-to-date.
- I no longer recommend Elegant Themes (a few of my sites still use their themes for now), mainly because they are not intuitive themes. What do I mean by intuitive? Well, after working with Dynamik and Genesis so far, I don’t need to be contacting the Support Desk/Forum as often as I did with Elegant Themes. With Elegant Themes, something as simple as adding my Aweber opt-in web form, would be troublesome. I’d have to go in and adjust the padding through the CSS. Everything just took longer.
- Other problems I’ve had, on two sites using Elegant Themes, are that parts of the sites have broken. After a wordpress update, links weren’t working. Or things that had previously been in my navigation menu, were no longer there. It was always kind of a surprise as to what would be the next issue. This was completely unlike my free theme, believe it or not! I never had to worry about that theme any time I made wordpress updates or changed something on it. When you contact support, Elegant Themes’ common answer is to disable your plugins first and see if a plugin has caused the problems. I agree that some plugins are problematic, but I never understood why a plugin that worked fine on a free theme was causing so much grief on their theme.
I’ve always enjoyed creating websites, so that is why I’ve decided to offer this service again (I flipped websites in the past on Flippa). However, the last thing I want is for you to have all sorts of problems with your new (or redesigned) site, so I made sure to do my homework before deciding on themes I would feel comfortable using, and that I know would offer you reliability in the future. The last thing either one of us wants is to be having to fix things on a broken site all the time. I even consulted with those I trust on the forum I’m part of, Solomasterminds.
Guess what most people recommended? Genesis!
That shouldn’t surprise you. After all, the title of this post says it all! 🙂
So why Genesis?
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So, if you would like to use my services to design or redesign your website/blog using the best of the best products, I’m only an email away. 🙂