13Floor: Part 1 of 87

Posted by sorabji on Nov 21, 2015

Last year I purchased a “Lifetime Access” subscription to Elegant Themes, a collection of 87 WordPress themes intended to characterize a variety of content niches and categories. This suite of themes appears to target independent web developers who do not necessarily possess graphic design skills but who need a stable of ready-made themes that they can use to quickly develop credible looking sites with buzzword compliance (mobile friendly, responsive, SEO…).

For a time I kind of regretted the expense. The existential angst of committing to a “Lifetime Access” subscription added to the ennui. I found little use for almost all these themes, which are anything but elegant when you get under the hood and wrestle with acres of bloated and unwieldy CSS code. I do not actively solicit freelance web development work, so it appeared that the purpose of these themes was lost on me.

To get my money’s worth out of the expense I connected two dots: I have far more than enough content to fill 87 web sites, and exploring the idiosyncrasies of all these themes as thoroughly as one individual reasonably can suddenly sounded like a fun thing to do. If I fine tune my Wordpress skills and if I can potentially leverage these ready-made themes for paid freelance work then all the better.

At present I do not intend to make this project a straight review of the Elegant Themes suite of themes, but I see no reason not to comment on the inevitable annoyances and welcome surprises. As of yet I have developed sites using only a handful of these 87 themes. The Payphone Project & Sorabji.NYC use modified versions of Divi, which appears to be the centerpiece of the Elegant Themes suite.

Those sites uses “child” version of Divi. For the purposes of this project I do not expect to modify these themes. My intent with this project is to populate all 87 Elegant Themes in a way that delivers the type of content for which each was intended.

13Floor is a homepage-centric theme which appears intended to function as something akin to a landing page. It does not look like a theme which one would fill with hundreds of postings or a significant quantity of content. 13Floor’s home page claims that 13Floor “comes with five unique colors schemes to help ensure that there is a style that suits your needs”. Those 5 color schemes look pretty similar to me.

The sparse quantity of questions posted in the theme’s members-only support forum suggests that 13Floor is one of Elegant Themes’ lesser-used themes. I actually like the way it looks “out of the box”, even if the sidebar headers are clunky and the 3D effect is a bit hulkish.

The first trick I solved involved the red buttons which link from story excerpts on the home page to full content. For some reason the default text for this is “SIGN UP NOW”, a plea which makes no sense for my content. To replace this text one must create a custom field named “Button” and in the “Value” field next to it place whatever text you want to fill the button.

Unfortunately this bit of text from the custom field does not transfer to category pages, where a generic “Read More” button is placed after each excerpt. I think the custom field text would make the category pages more interesting, and encourage more clicks.

As I mentioned in Terribles, the first content with which I started filling this theme, there appears to be no explanation for why this theme is named 13Floor. One assumes it is a reference to the superstition that 13 is an unlucky number, and on account of that belief most high rises and taller office buildings appear to not include a 13th floor.

This theme, then, evokes an air of mystery by claiming to be that mythical missing space.

If that’s not what it means then I am open to other interpretations.