I created my original website in 1999, using.shtml. over the years I added hundreds of pages to the site and navigation became unwieldy. Also, the design was not responsive and I could see that I was losing a lot of traffic in terms of smartphones and tablets. After researching the market extensively, I chose Solostream WP-Clear as a new front end for the site. Just by doing this, the number of page views on my site has increased by over 1000 pages a day, thanks to the superior navigation and responsiveness of WP-Clear. Also, our production and publishing time on new articles has been significantly reduced thanks to the multi-authoring capability of the WordPress front-end. I only wish I had done this years ago.
Great looking theme. Very easy to configure. The admin panel was very easy to to use and very clear about what functions did what. Customization was a breeze. I love my WP blog!
The Massachusetts Data Analysis Center (Mass-DAC) is a a data-coordination center and research analytic group working with cardiac surgery and cardiology related data sources within Massachusetts and nationally. The DaVinci theme provides a simple layout design that is easily structured by our non-technical staff. It also provides a clean interface for our user base which includes medical professionals, data managers, and general consumers of information. Plug-ins added to enhance DaVinci theme components integrate flawlessly and when we have had a question about a particular feature, technical support at SoloStream had a simple solution that could easily be implemented. Having a simple way to set colors for the site and the included page templates have allowed us to easily maintain the content, keeping it fresh, using non-technical editors and authors.
Stability. Reliability. Flexibility. Compatibility. Infinitely customizable. Superior customer support.
If you have a vision as to how you want your site to look, feel, and function choose Solostream.
Solostream themes, in this case Enlightened, do not restrict your options nor limit your vision, they inspire and enable.
I’m not a developer by any stretch. I’m not familiar with WordPress magic nor could I explain its inner workings if my life depended on it. Solostream’s basic framework is so well crafted that I don’t need to. I can focus on my readers, my content, presentation and brand aesthetic.
Although there’s plenty of discussion about the pros and cons of plugins, they do provide additional functionality, services, and features that realistically, a single theme cannot. In my experience, Solostream themes are plugin friendly. Good quality, well supported plugins combined with the Solostream framework and tailored CSS can, and will, result in a stable, unique expression of your interest, passion and content. Enlightened is receptive and Solostream plays nice with new ideas.
Aesthetic changes are, with a little bit of CSS knowledge, easy and the built-in customization allows me to experiment without having to learn yet “another” go around to get the results I’m seeking. It also eliminates any worries that my changes will be sacrificed to the ether during the next theme update, or plugin activation.
Customer support is easily accessible and their response time is praiseworthy. I’ve never been left hanging, in panic, lost in a muddle, even when I deserved it. 🙂
In fact, on more than one occasion I’ve received above and beyond, often unsolicited advice about my less than optimal CSS or what might be required to achieve the result I desire. Most basic customizations that come easily to these guys are shared freely – just for the asking. Customizations, beyond the basics, are available for a fee. I don’t know if there’s anything that can’t be done with a Solostream theme.
This particular site is very small. It focuses on a very small audience, in a very small community experiencing very specific and controversial challenges. The site has, and will, see many changes, adaptations and reiterations; it’s a work in progress – a labor of love – probably always will be. Enlightened allows me to change and grow as circumstances dictate.
Enlightened is enlightened and Solostream is one of a kind.
The Brilliance theme provides a crisp, clean look for our public facing website for a national public-private partnership project with the FDA. The goal of the site is to provide information about analytic studies on improving medical device safety and effectiveness throughout the full medical device life cycle. The ease of creating site elements with menus, widgets, featured post/page sliders and the basic site layout controls for design and color enable our non-technical editors to feel comfortable maintaining the content and improvising with some artistic flourishes. Having available an array of predefined template buttons and <div> CSS elements allowed us to create the content structure to fit the needs of our group. Additionally, the inclusion of a custom.css and template-custom-functions.php files have enabled us to add enhanced features within the user-friendly components available in the Brilliance theme.
There was a short learning curve as I experimented with the various theme settings. After the usual beginners’ mistakes, I quickly began to know my way around the settings. Then I tried out various configurations as I put the website together. I still have two or three more things I want to do but will have to wait until this current bout of travelling is over. I find the software quite easy although I confess to preferring to write in Word, a habit of years, and then transferring the text into WP. As a retirement hobby, I find WP is like an old friend. Sometimes you talk, and sometimes you don’t but you’re always comfortable. Hope you enjoy the website.
Enlightened was very easy to use and had everything we were looking for. All of the Solostream themes are well designed, making it hard to decide which one to use.
I needed to create a website that would look and act like a newspaper for communities and advertisers that had never experienced a local web only newspaper. It needed to look “old-timey” but still contain the functions and flexibility of a sophisticated site. (The compliments continue to pour in about the look of the site.)
It needed to be attractive, user friendly, with lots of ad space, and enough space for articles, archives and add-ons so that readers and advertisers would feel that they were experiencing something special in their communities. Those add-ons include weather, Facebook syncs for posts, a huge business directory, a calendar, among others.
I was able to change the theme enough in the development stage to get what I needed to launch. But then in the second and third years have relied on help from the Solostream staff, in particular Alistair. He was able to set up two ad stacks that rotate upon refresh and do other behind-the-scenes work for us since our heads are wrapped around the front-end work at this point.
Thanks to a solidly attractive theme, ease of use on the administration end and Solostream staff support, we have entered our fourth year with a highly readable site that continues to grow in readership and advertising every month.
I picked Enlightened for the robust A MORE BEAUTIFUL QUESTION blog since I loved the way the portfolio widget and category sliders looked—both of which I used throughout the site, but most prominently on the widgetized Home page. Once I started using Enlightened, I ended up exploring and using almost all of its miscellaneous features and design elements (like various column configurations). This theme has expanded beautifully to solve all my challenges with the ever-changing, magazine-like AMBQ blog. Loved Enlightened so much that I used the same theme for two spin-off sites related to the original blog (http://warrenberger.com and http://questionweek.com). I wanted them to look in the same family but different enough not to confuse people, and the flexibility of Enlightened with its Alternate Home page and widgetized page templates has worked out splendidly. My very favorite thing about Enlightened, though, is the excellent, searchable support forum. If I can’t find an ans
wer
specific to my question, Alistair is always right there with personalized help.
I installed the DaVinci theme a couple of years ago, because with the free themes I’d started using from WordPress I was getting plugin clashes and all sorts of issues.
Moving to the Da-Vinci theme was a simple and trouble-free experience – and has remained so ever since. The site has survived two years problem-free and I expect it to continue the same way.
I got a faster loading site and it was easy to tailor the theme to make it look the way I wanted.
Highly recommended 🙂