How to Use X Theme for Business Websites

Written by Kevin Liew on 27 Jan 2015
43,084 Views • Miscellaneous

Are you a freelance web designer? Do you want to make a website for your creative start-up? Or, do you just see a lot of business projects these days and you’re on a roll? We want to share how simple it is to create web stores, product/app presentations, and company websites with the X Theme.

Why X, and not some other WordPress theme? We all want flexible themes that are based on clean code, and offer many shortcodes. We want themes like X, which give us a full package and always have planned updates. If you heard about the extensions released with version 3.0, now is the right time to try them for good measure.

Step One: the Stack

What do you want your business website to look like? Make it professional and sleek. Give your end users the sense that they’re dealing with a respectable professional who is qualified to solve their problems. X Theme has introduced four wholesome designs by now. The Stacks Integrity, Renew, Icon, and Ethos each suit a different purpose. Create your business websites with Integrity.

Blog pages, portfolios, shops - you name it. Everything you wish to build into a company website comes easy with Integrity. Use the standard or masonry layout to organize products and showcase any previous success. Get more exposure on social networks by enabling share buttons in the portfolio index. Also, insert a catchy welcome message at the top of your shop page, and wrap it up with an action button.

A couple of tips: make the header transparent and the background image peek through. Also, flick to a dark version for the entire color scheme - or a light one, for that matter. You’re bound to get an elegant website design with Integrity.

Step Two: Inspiration

Integrity is responsible for beautiful business websites. If you want to get inspired from some real life uses of this Stack, have a look at these samples:

Big, bold statement of purpose and call-to-action: check!

Dynamic product presentation: check!

Friendly welcome message: check!

Also, discover these websites:

http://www.digitalbrew.com/

http://chickart.de/

http://www.lloydhallmenswear.com/

Step Three: the Customizer

Now that you have a clear idea where you’re headed with your business website design, translate it into action. Open the WordPress Dashboard, and move your cursor to Appearance > Customize.

Click on it, and step onto your Customizer. Notice that the screen is split in two. Theme options and settings are on the left. The live preview window is on the right. Read the notes. X Theme has attached many suggestions and explanations to the settings. And thanks to the live preview function, you always get a good sense of what you’re doing. Only commit to the most desirable look for your website, and then serve it to your end users as you click “Save & Publish”.

Every copy of X Theme can be made into a completely unique website. Even within the same Stack. However, after you successfully complete a certain number of projects, patterns may form. You may want to use the exact same settings more than once. If that is your wish, then check underneath the Customizer sub-menu for the Import and Export sections. Find all the necessary information there (it’s no more difficult that with the WordPress Importer plugin), and replicate your settings across multiple domains.

Step Four: the Extensions

When you set up a business website, the best you can hope for is to get a lot of traffic on it and a sky-high conversion rate. Enlist plugins that help you draw in obscene amounts of traffic, and use some form of analytics to see how you’re doing over time.

All in all, X Theme 3.0 has released 15 Extensions or free premium WordPress plugins. Some of them are created by Theme.co, and others are customized. You can easily recognize third-party plugins. Their settings are the ones you’re already used to, yet each of them has been optimized for unparalleled performance, because they’re part of X Theme. Activate and manage Extensions from here:

For your business website, look into Extensions such as Content Dock, Video Lock, MailChimp Integration, Terms of Use, Custom 404, Under Construction, Disqus Comments, Slider Revolution, and Google Analytics.

When users visit a business website, they first need to acknowledge your Terms of Use. At the same time, you have to construct a nice-looking form and get them to subscribe to a MailChimp e-mailing list. Activate the MailChimp Integration from X Theme, and you’ll see how easy it is to customize your form.

Present marketing offers with a video screen, or a content box. How big is the offer, and your desire to make it visible? A content box is a lot less invasive, but it doesn’t communicate offers as boldly as a center-stage video. I’d rather use the Content Dock to suggest some recommended products or posts, and leave sensational deals for the Video Lock.

They’re both very easy to configure. Insert shortcodes, links, images and text into your content box, and style it up as you please. Respectively, caption your responsive video with a custom heading and subheading, cut down on some pixels if you want to change the width, and set a timer for when it appears on screen.

Furthermore, a business website should always be prepared for broken links. Turn things around for your misguided users with Custom 404, the extension that helps you put up an explanatory notice, set a background image, and insert a search function. Finally, monitor traffic with Google Analytics.

You’re Good to Go!

There is no step five. You now have all you need in order to construct a fabulous business website: Integrity, a smooth Customizer, and a handful of useful Extensions. It’s very easy to design for yourself or for your high-end clients with X Theme, don’t you think?

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