ThemeKit Expo

Artist | Designer | Photographer
Website Theme

ThemeKit Expo

Artist | Designer | Photographer

A website for an artist or designer needs special consideration to find the best way to display images of artwork, products and designs.
Navigation
The home page navigation needs to provide links to the pages and an image navigation should also be added to navigate to project and portfolio pages.
Slideshow
One of the main issues is finding a slideshow to display images with radically different aspect ratios. The ThemeKit Expo Adaptive Slider was created specifically for this purpose.
Connect
A creative arts website needs to create a great fisrt impression and to immediately form a connection with potential customers/clients.
Having a bio on the home page will achieve this. It needs to be kept short and to the point so additional info is provided in the "Info Drawer" below it.

Bio Card

Title

The article has a name, optional title, description and an optional link.
The overlap is created using a background linear gradient with a color to the left and transparency to the right.
Adjusting the percentage width of the transparent section adusts the overlap.

More Info

Open Drawer

Description

The ThemeKit Expo Info Drawer widget is designed to be positioned below a product to provide extra info with the option to add a list for item features or specifications.
The description has a heading, text and an optional link to open nternal or external pages.
Action Tab
The action tab has controls for the icon color, background and border radius. Setting the border width sliderto maximum value will make the tab round.
The tab shows a span on hover with text to indicate its purpose. The text has controls for font size, color, background color and border radius.
On touch devices the span wil show on tap and is hidden by tapping anywhere else on the device's screeen.

Info Link

List

The list heading shares the controls for text heading
The list can have up to 48 items
The list has controls for font size, line height, list item spacing ad inset
The available list style types are disc, circle, square, none, decimal, decimal-leading-zero, lower-alpha and upper-alpha
Relative columns widths can be adjusted
The list can be above or below the text on screen widths below the breakpoint.

eCommerce

If the website is required to include an eStore to sell products this needs to be a little more upscale than a bunch of PayPal buttons.
Check out the eCommerce theme made to integrate the ECWID eStore in an EverWeb website.
ECWID is an ideal way to move into selling online since there is a free version which allows up to ten products.
Take a look at ECWID and sign up for a free account to explore its features.

Ecwid eCommerce

ThemeKit Ecwid Theme

This eCommerce theme has been designed from the ground up to allow EverWeb users to create a fast downloading professional grade website to display and sell products and services.

Ecwid Theme

First Impression

Many artist, desgner websites seem to be based on basic thmes which all tend to look alike with the vertical navigation to the left of the main image. They are also excruciatingly slow to download in the browser and useless for viewing on mobile devices.
A more up to date approch is a full with hero with a graphic style text overlay like the one on this page
For those who want to stick with the old way there is a more modern version of this type of item created using the ThemeKit Expo Hero + Navigation widget …

Hero + Navigation

Essentials

Like any successfull website the pages must download in under 2 seconds on mobile devices and score over 90 in the Google PageSpeed Insights test.
To achieve a good score all images must be correctly sized and optimised before importing into EverWeb and have a lazy loading function.
Like all the EverWeb ThemeKit themes the Expo widgets are optimised for fast and efficient page download load.

Page Speed

Navigation

Responsive website navigation has changed a lot over the past decade and the standard inline links with drop downs for directories has proven to be really inefficient at getting visitors to click through to other page.
Navigation should be vertical and preferably open as an overlay with the links front or center.
Drop downs for directories are confusing and should be replaced by a separate menu which will be even better if it has images.
Follow the links below to check out the navigation types available with the Expo theme …

Inline Navigation

For websites with juat a few pages inline links can be used but should be inserted below the hero or inside it.
Follow the links below to see examples of inline links …

Footer

Like most responsive websites an artist/desigher page layout really doesn't need to be spoiled by a large ugly footer with hard to find and read info.
The footer on this page is out of site until required and can be replaced by a multifunction footer bar on most pages.

Footer Bar