It’s been a while since Out of My Tree Genealogy had an overhaul and this week while I was on vacation, I decided to do a total overhaul on the website, turning it from a traditional genealogy blog into a Magazine and Newspaper type website where I could feature all things genealogy including not only my own family history journey, but also the latest news, reviews, technology tips, methodology suggestions and of course, social history stories.
I knew the style that I was looking for (a cross between Boston News and The Next Web) so I began searching for an appropriate theme that would give me the look and feel I was after. I wanted a front page that could feature articles from many categories in a more interesting way than the traditional blog format. Also, since I’m writing a book (more later) and am committed to publishing a longform article over at The Social Historian every week, I don’t always have time to post everyday and have decided that quality posts will out weigh quantity here.
After hours of searching, I landed back on my favourite WordPress theme website called ThemeForest, which is part of the Envato Market website. They offer everything from themes, to code, to video to audio to graphics to photos in one easy website.
Meet Motive News
After browsing through hundreds of themes and viewing demos for many, I finally decided on the Magazine News – Motive theme by ThemeSphere. It has a 4.75 average buyer rating and 849 sales on ThemeForest alone. Surprisingly, with all the features it offers, it was only $44.00 which is a little on the low end. Despite that the theme has some impressive features.
Visual Composer
Motive comes with the premium plugin Visual Composer pre-installed. Visual Composer is a page builder for WordPress that lets you build pages with a drag and drop editor and it is incredibly powerful and very intuitive. So far, I’ve just figured things out as I went but I think I will spend some time watching their tutorials to see what else it can do. You can use it in the WordPress back end or, even better, on the front end, with no coding required. It can work with any theme, not just Motive. Here is their promotional video from YouTube.
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