LightSpeed » Themes

LightSpeed: Now an official Affiliate Woo Worker

Barend Potgieter — Wed, 23 Mar 2011 15:18:04 +0000

LightSpeed has a long and proud history of working with WooThemes, and WooThemes are our first choice for quality premium themes when developing our WordPress based websites. WooThemes make our lives easier, and helps us to provide our clients with the most stylish and user friendly websites possible. We’ve built up years of experience in ripping the themes apart and customizing them to meet our client’s specific needs, we use WooThemes (particularly Canvas) for most of our development and we cannot sing the praises of the WooFramework enough.That is why we are exceptionally proud to have been accepted as an Affiliated Woo Worker by WooThemes. What this means is that WooThemes acknowledge our top quality skills as WordPress Web developers with specialist knowledge in customizing and working with Woo Themes, and recommend our services to their clients – what better endorsement can you get?

We are looking forward to a long continued relationship with WooThemes and will continue to offer the best WordPress web solutions available to our clients.

Woo-Hoo!

Single Page Websites – The elegant and minimalist solution

Ashley Shaw — Mon, 21 Feb 2011 11:59:30 +0000

A strong web presence is of incredible importance for any business or enterprising individual. It is your online business card and 24 hour storefront that promotes your business to a global audience.

Many SME’s put off getting their own website for various reasons:

Website development is seen as expensive, and in the current economy business owners might prefer to hold on to their cash.
Management of a website is seen as a hassle, and in tightly run businesses they might feel that there is no time to devote to managing a website
They feel that they don’t have enough content to populate an entire website

At LightSpeed we’ve developed a website package to address these concerns and offer an affordable web presence for any business. A single page website is a minimalist solution for small businesses, designers, artists and others that want an elegant yet simple online presence that is easy to manage and visually intriguing.

What’s the difference between a single page website and a normal website?

Well, at LightSpeed we don’t every build any ‘normal’ website. All our websites are exceptionally well crafted with the best bleeding edge WordPress technology available and premium themes, but nonetheless there are differences between a standard website layout and a single page website:

Single Page sites have one URL for all content, whereas a normal website has multiple pages, with a different URL for each individual page
On a single page website different types of content are displayed on tabbed areas of the same page, whereas with a normal website there will usually be a page dedicated to each different content type.

To put it in Geek:

“A Single Page Website is a website that displays all content on its one and only page, the Home Page. Navigation between content areas is done through the use of HTML A-tags (The name attribute) linking to bookmarks on the same page instead of other pages. This enables us to create stylish minimalist designs with innovative navigation.“

Our Designs

At LightSpeed we’ve come up with many innovative themes for your single page website, each with it’s own unique navigation and look. These themes can be styled to fit your color scheme and corporate branding.

Our previous single page website solutions include a stylish online catalog for Mat Blac handcrafted leather apparel and a unique web based portfolio for Mememotion, a Cape Town based motion design studio.

If you are looking for a cost effective yet stylish web presence powered by the best content management system, our Single Page Website Package is the place to start.

The 7 Magnificent ways WooThemes makes our lives easier

Ashley Shaw — Wed, 01 Sep 2010 16:39:10 +0000

LightSpeed loves WooThemes, and we use their themes extensively to help us build dynamic, kick ass websites for our clients. Here’s a list of reasons we do:

1. Canvas

Canvas is the most sophisticated and comprehensive WooTheme, with unparalleled flexibility and the most frequent updates.

How Flexible? We’ve recently developed these sites using Canvas as framework:

It is a clean theme to work with – and empty shell – that allows the most thorough control with regards to changes and settings that you can use in a website, with the variety of options more diverse than other themes.

At LightSpeed, Canvas forms the base template for most designs. Any functionality can be ported from other Woothemes to make it more dynamic, but we try to use canvas options as far as possible.

2. Child Themes

The benefit of using child themes is that when developing – only the parent theme needs to be updated and it filters through to all child themes. This has a massive impact on saving time.

3. SEO

WooThemes have incorporated SEO within their Framework making the All-in-One SEO plugin obsolete. Each page and post comes with it’s own SEO options.

4.Export

WooThemes has an export option, allowing the export of all theme options from dev sites to the live site. This avoids double work by having to reset up all options on the live site.

5. Branding

WooThemes come with a branding option within the Framework settings, giving you the option to remove WooThemes branding on the site and replace it with your own.

6. Styling

The Styling options are a huge help to the developers as it allows the styling of a site to be done before a line of code has been written. Furthermore, once delivered, it allows clients to customize their styling without outside help from a developer and without touching any code, giving the client more control over their site.

7. Navigation

The Woo Menu’s provide great functionality to customize navigation, but with the incorporation of the new WordPress Menus in WorPress 3.0 this is no longer of great importance.

WooThemes have recently announced plans to develop Canvas further into a framework with even more added options. Frankly, we can’t wait.

Mobile theme and tools for buddypress needed

Ashley Shaw — Tue, 11 Nov 2008 20:07:33 +0000

I have noticed lately that all the major social media and social networking websites are coming out with a mobile version of their website hosted like this – m.socialsite.com – If you view it in a browser it looks like an extremely stripped down version of the main website. Click on these websites and see for yourself:

My suggestion is as follows:

Create a theme for BuddyPress
The theme needs to include with a bunch of mobile tools
The tools should include a mobile optimized website at m.socialsite.com
Users needs an easy way to upload photos and notes to the website via SMS and MMS messages
Users should also be able to receive new BuddyPress messages on their phones via SMS, but might be costly to implement.

A well-known South African blogger called Matthew Buckland wrote and awesome article on the future of the mobile internet. Read the article if you are interested in in what I am talking about.

I am going to write next about how I see a need for combining the mobile theme with a Jabber Client to allow users to chat anywhere, connect and grow the network in their geographic location.

Please give feedback?

WordPress.com Themes would be great for testbp.org

Ashley Shaw — Sun, 09 Nov 2008 14:36:37 +0000

I have been working with the WordPress.com themes on and I can definitely say that if you are not sure what themes to use on your WordPress-MU/BuddyPress system, try using the same themes they use on WordPress.com. It is easy to get hold of them, they are available via Subversion. You will need a subversion client to check the files out of the repository. Here is what I suggest you do:

If you are running Windows then download and install the subversion client called TortoiseSVNotherwise pick one of the following:
1. Subclipse (Eclipse)
2. Subversive (Eclipse)
3. SCPlugin (Mac OS X)
4. RapidSVN (cross-platform)
5. AnkhSVN (Visual Studio)
6. VisualSVN (Visual Studio)
7. …more clients…
To read some about using subversion try these documents:
1. Mailing Lists (non-subscribers can post)
2. FAQ (Frequently Asked Questions)
3. Subversion Book (complete online)
On you Windows PC you will add a new folder, then you right-click the folder and look for the TortoiseSVN option that says “SVN Checkout”
The TortoiseSVN Checkout windows pops open and you need add the URL of the repository = http://svn.automattic.com/wpcom-themes – Click OK, then click YES
It should take a while to download the themes, but its worth it!
Upload all the themes to /wp-content/themes like you normally would.

My suggestion is that the WP.COM themes be added to TestBP.org, it might encourage some of the testers to using the blogs more. I read a post on the forum the following about making a theme BuddyPress aware:

Yes, any theme you use with BuddyPress will need a plugin-sidebar.php and plugin-template.php file. It’s used to add dynamic functionality and new pages to the theme without having to drop in new template files. The settings menu and pages are examples of this.

Is that all that is needed or is there more? Any out in the community got any experience with that type of thing?

Note: Image Credit