This WordPress free business child theme is aimed at poeple that are comfortable working with themes, it is a beta theme which means it is working but there is still scope to develop it.
To use this theme you will need your WordPress install to be up to date, at the point of writing this post the current download is WordPress 3.3.1.
The content of the child themes download file consists of 12 files, the download can be uploaded from the Admin > Appearance > Themes.
The Theme
The theme is a nice clean theme, it uses custom post types for the information boxes, has built in widgets to display the information pages, and a widget for the WP Nivo Slider, this allows us to drop the slider into a template widget area, without editing code.
See the theme in action here before you Download.
Basic Setup
We start by uploading the theme and activating it, we then create an empty page for the home template, the content can be left empty or we could add text, if we want a blog page we create a second empty page, in the screenshots we created one called “Welcome” and the other called “News”
For our Welcome page we apply the template page “Home Splash Page”
Next we go to Settings > Reading, we set the Welcome page as the Front page, and if we want blog posts we set the News page as the Posts page.
If we look preview the theme now we will see an empty website with no content, so we will add some posts next.
Information Posts
These are WordPress custom post types, they do not appear in the post lists, we will use these in widgets to show the services we offer, on the menu we can see a new section called Information Posts, we start by selecting “Add New”
If we look at this post we can see that we have added a Featured Image, this will display in the Information Widgets, the images used here will be cropped to 440 * 260 for use with the widget.
We can create any number of these to use in our theme, we will need four if we want a row of posts on our home page, our testing images were for a Wedding Organiser.
Normal Posts
If we are using the WP Nivo Slider we need posts with featured images, and a category to select in the settings page, we used a category of Featured, and created a number of normal posts.
The nivo slider images are set against a category, after we download and activate the slider we add images as featured images to our selected posts.
As we have a category called Featured, the featured images for the slider must be at least 1000px wide, and will be cropped by WordPress.
WP Nivo Slider Images
We download and activate the WP Nivo Slider from our Plugins page.
We then set the category and number of posts in Settings > WP Nivo Slider
Theme Widget
The theme has two new widgets and five new widget areas, we have four Information areas and a wide header area for our slider.
The My Nivo Slider widget has no setup and all it does is load the slider without having to edit code.
Add a Information Posts widget to the new area “Information Area 1″, add a title optional, and select a post from the list, check the Excerpt only for long posts.
Repeat this for the other three Information Area’s
View the Website
Here is a screenshot when we view the homepage again we will see our widget areas are populated with our Information posts and the slider
We can make use of the WordPress footer widgets as well, these will show on the other pages as well.
Finishing Off
If we are using a slider then we might want to remove the WordPress headers from other pages, to do this we go to Appearance > Headers, there is a button to remove header images, we click this and save.
Now if we navigate on a link to the other pages we will see the header has gone, and the pages match our new look.
Thats all, download and use the code or theme as a starter theme, we cannot offer support on our themes as they are free to download and use, we would like to see how you use the themes, or how you have enhanced them!
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This is brilliant! This child theme adds features that should be in the default WordPress template. I could not find any plugins that offered this type of functionality. This child theme adds highly useful widgets and widget areas! The implementation is very sophisticated! You thought of everything, you even included a custom style sheet ready for adding custom CSS styles. Thank you immensely!
Hi David,
What a clean business theme this is. I downloaded the Kubrick-based Business theme you created in 2009 but this one is elegant and useful for me. Here are some suggestions.
Although you use the Wivo featured slider for posts, I think it would be best to have a “Blog” page for posts in the top menu especially since a blog page is standard and people can scan blog posts without having to use the search box.
Also, does this theme include the footer widgets? I plan to add social icons to the left of the top menu once I figure out how to do so.
Hi David,
I like this child theme. I like viewing the sidebar on post pages but I guess that can fixed by adding the sidebar code on the post pages. More questions:
1. Can we use another featured slider plugin instead of the WP Nivo Slider? Moo Slider is more flexible and it would be nice to use just have of the screen width for the slider and the other half for a call to action or a video.
2. Can you make the Information page icons clickable, and not just the “Read more…” text link?
3. Is this theme mobile ready?
This them looks great, however when I went to add the Home Splash Page template, it didn’t appear as an option
Hi David,
I downloaded 2011 Information Theme in February containing the nivo slider and a few days ago I downloaded the “Information” theme which you said is still in beta and I see that you’re working on adding the flex slider. I think that the Anything Slider plugin is a better option since you’re spanning the slider in the header info. As the name implies, you can add images, videos, text, forms or your heart’s desire to the Anything Slider.
Hello,
The my nivo slider widget is missing from your download package. So there is no widget to install the slider in.
Can you fix it ?
Thank you