WordPress TwentyFourteen Theme Dazzles

Wordpress TwentyFourteen Theme Dazzles

One trend that we have seen this year will continue in 2014 and that is the use of larger and more beautiful images. Pinterest and Instragram have validated how much we like images and visuals.

Now WordPress is releasing their new theme for 2014, aptly named TwentyFourteen and larger images are featured in this Magazine Style theme which I think will be useful for agents to display listings.

The TwentyFourteen theme was released early and is now available, so this week I installed  the TwentyFourteen theme on our site at BoomerPlaces.com and really like the improvements.  The new theme has a larger and bolder look to it. Specifically, I like these changes:

1. There are two menu locations, one up on the header as before but another one in the left column. This makes sense to me since the left column is where visitors naturally look for navigation. Each menu can have it's own content. I put only the most important links on the top menu and have my pages and other content in the menu that appears in the left column.

2. There is a featured content function that appears across the top of the home page in either a grid or a slider format. I tried both on our site and chose the slider format. This is where the images and visuals come into play as I mentioned. I had to make sure I had a featured image on each of the featured posts and those images need to be 1035 pixels wide for optimum size. You can feature any post by simply adding the tag "featured".

3. There is a new widget with this theme called Twenty Fourteen Ephemera that is quite interesting. This new widget can go in the primary left sidebar or in the content sidebar on the right or down in the footer widget area. Here is the neat thing about this widget: it displays posts by type, such as Aside, Image, Video, Audio, Quote, Link or Gallery. You can indicate the number of posts to display.  I am using the Ephemera widget at the bottom of my left column to show a Photo Gallery. That is, those posts of the gallery type.

I just installed this theme two days ago when I upgraded to the WordPress 3.8 version which just became available.  I found this theme easy to install and customize.  You will probably have to add a large featured image for posts you want to feature, but you only need a few to get started. I think it has been a nice upgrade for our site and think the TwentyFourteen Wordpress theme will be a big hit in 2014.