Powerful, simple & intuitive WordPress theme designed for content publishers. Designed to redefine UX by making content both easier to create and consume.
TIMES is a premium WordPress theme that I’ve created back in 2016. Since then, it was bought over 330 times on ThemeForest marketplace and received dozens of 5 star reviews for customer support and overall satisfaction. This is by far my biggest and most ambitious project I’ve started — and I’ve learned lots!
I remember opening WordPress for the first time back in the day. Coming from much more user-friendly platforms like Tumblr, WordPress appeared a bit overwhelming at first. All those notifications, buttons, links, dashboard widgets were a bit much.
After a few tries, I managed to figure out how to get around the platform and get things done. Since then, I’ve learned to love WordPress for the high level of customization, extensive functionality and security it provides and sigh over its poor user experience.
This theme was my attempt at improving this aspect of the platform while retaining all the expansibility it provides, in order to create better blogging and content publishing experience.
If you ever bought a premium WordPress theme you are most likely familiar with the tribulations of actually installing it. There are often tens of plugins and extensions that you need to install, one by one, just so your website resembles the demo page. Most of them, are from 3rd party developers and won’t integrate fully with your theme, leaving you to deal with all the updates, notifications, advertising and nagging to buy the PRO version. Yuck!
What’s worse, after you’ve installed the theme, you can’t just start blogging, every theme developer has a different way of customizing the features of your theme. Some of the options are in the WP’s native customization panel, some options are available in the settings page or even some other theme generated settings page.
So you have two options. You can either, read the documentation (which in most cases is outdated and not maintained after new features are added) or download the pre-made demo that the theme author provides. For the sake of time, most people choose the latter and download the demo content, which will flood their site with random stock images and sample content that will have to be later excruciatingly removed.
In the end, you’re not really buying a flexible and versatile theme, but a simple template — which is a shame, because WordPress can do so much more. I really wanted my theme to be different than this, to be fully versatile but also highly customizable.
The idea was that the content should dicatate how the site looks and that the layout should fluidly adapt to the ever changing content. A theme that one could quickly install and start blogging right away without heavy demo content or the need for long documentations.
I like to think, that I just might have managed to achieve that.
To achieve the previously mentioned task, both the front-end and back-end had to work well together. That is why this theme provides all the necessary standards that all modern websites should have, like a fully responsive layout or responsive images and support for HDPI (Retina) screens along with great SEO-optimization.
I’m a firm believer in that small details can make a big difference. That is why, the theme is peppered with little things and functionalities that aim to improve the overall user experience. As an example, take the little bookmark tab that appears while hovering over the post on the homepage so you can easily bookmark that article for later, or the improved comment replies that prevent infinitely nested replies within one comment, or the upvoting functionality that keeps users engaged in the discussion.
All those features ultimately won’t matter if the process of adding your content is inadequate. Luckily the new addition of Gutenberg adresses a lot of concerns regarding content creation. It’s now recommened to have your post editor look as closely as the end article that will be published on your site. But back in 2016, when I started the development of the theme, this idea wasn’t common at all. The focus mode was also my addition. In the end, it felt really nice to have my ideas verified by the WP team.
Now as I mentioned earlier, one of the problems with other themes is that the settings are scattered across the dashboard and you can’t instantly preview your changes because there’s no live preview.
The native WP customizer addresses this problem and as it is bundled with every WP install, that’s why I decided to make it the main place for all thing theme related. Sadly, the user interface leaves a lot to be desired. It’s not really clean and readable, the controls are basic and it’s very, very gray.
Luckily all this can be easily adjusted! The new theme customizer I made features color scheme tools, custom footer text builder, cookie notice control, improved controls and so much more.
Notice the custom icons for each category, the custom-designed controls for certain settings or the typographic structure and the careful organization of all options.
All of this was crafted to give each user great customer experience — and I think that you can easily tell the difference!
To avoid the mess and bulk of 3rd party website builders, I decided to create my own version of the homepage builder, designed just for the theme. It may seem like an ambitious or foolish venture, but thanks to the built-in WP customizer, it was actually a relatively quick process. In this live editor, you can tweak and instantly preview any aspect of the theme, making customization easy and effortless.
The homepage is divided into sections or modules. Each section on the homepage can have different settings as to what content it’ll show. The order of sections can be easily changed by a drag-and-drop motion in the customizer. You can see all the changes live and only the relevant sections will update with AJAX.
While using a demo content with this theme is not required or necessary, some folks actually prefer making changes and customizations to their theme with a sample content applied. That is why I endeavoured to create a custom demo content downloader. I wrote this demo downloader from scratch, starting with the design, through code implementation and basic API creation.
It was one of the most challenging and enjoyable features I have ever added to the theme. This demo content downloader is also designed to be unobtrusive — it will only attempt to add demo posts, menus and widgets but it will do so without wiping your whole site clean.
This theme also uses AJAX to indicate the download progress and the whole UI was designed to be simple and effective. All you have to do is click a button and the downloader will do the rest.
Now, no great product can ever be successful without great support. As the creator of this product, I was tasked with providing online support for it. This experience has provided me with so much insight as to how customers actually interact with my theme. I was able to see how my product was used by real, people and how their real content interacted with my designs.
This task challenged my empathetic skills to the maximum. With every single question, I really tried to get myself into the shoes of the customer, to provide only the kind of support that I would like to get.
Before I sent any email, I always asked myself, “Will this reply help or at least get the customer one step closer to finding a solution to the problem?”. Not to toot my own horn, but I’m happy to say that this approach worked really well and I have received very kind and thorough reviews, a selection of which can be seen down below. Also, a full review page can be found here.
These reviews are my proudest and most treasured awards. They remind me of why I got into design and coding in the first place, they make all this effort, planning and typing totally worth the while 😉
Hope you enjoyed this little case study! If you like what you saw, please don’t hesitate to reach out to me! This also applies if you have any feedback! I’m always happy to learn from others and improve my work. You can use the form below to get in touch or you contact me in other ways:
Email me: peter@everlydesigns.co.uk
Phone/Text/WhatsApp/Telegram: +44 7762 397190