Is there a theme that tics all boxes? or are we asking too much...

Hi all,

Looking for some advice on picking a new theme to rebuild our website. It is an art gallery site, no actual transactions through the site, but we take enquiries. In theory you could say it is a product based site that has dozens of products from about a dozen brands at a time, we also put out at least two articles a week on our blog.
Some of the features we are looking for are:

  • Easily add product pages, including adding tags for filtering and adding titles and main product pages etc.
  • Ability to easily add extra product pictures or galleries so that we can showcase products easily.
  • Ability to add automatic schema markup for “product” pages. So we don’t have try an load this ourselves through Google Tag Manager or placing HTML directly on every page.
  • AMP availability so that the pages can be optimised for mobile.
  • Product filtering so that we can have one product page but the user can filter by Artist, Size, or “custom filter”.
  • Ability to easily manage international versions of the site, meaning we would like to use the subfolder method to have /us-en/ and /gb-en/ versions of pages.

We are looking for something that will manage everything easily without the help of paying developers etc.

Is this possible with a theme such as AVADA, or will we always need a more custom site?

You won’t find all that out of the box.

  • If you don’t want to pay developers then even setting all that up could be a fairly big job.

  • AMP (properly implemented) is not massively common in stock themes yet.

  • The international element and advanced filtering/taxonomy could at worst be handled by plugins, but you will need to make sure that everything is well organised in the back end for this to work effectively.

  • if it were me, I would look at some form of portfolio/creative theme (although there are some nice gallery specific themes already which would at least serve as a starting point e.g. https://themeforest.net/item/musea-art-gallery-and-museum-theme/24972022) and just add an “enquire” button to individual artwork pages. This would be the lightest route and gives you the greatest choice of options.

The issue you are likely to have is that, with respect - it sounds a little like you want/need the best, but with minimal initial and ongoing investment. This sounds like quite a high end site and with potentially a lot of info and content running through it at any given time)?

Aside from the hosting considerations for that, any stock theme (esp. one the size of something like Avada), regardless of how good it is, will include a lot of code/features etc that you don’t need which will either mean a big job going through and stripping it out, or else extra unwanted strain on your site.

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Hi @DylanB4

It is possible to make with plugins and template, but as is Charlie say there is lots of settings I know from my experience it is not 3 clicks.
My advice is to take some light template because Avada has tons of options and in most cases users dont use all that.

Thanks for the info @charlie4282 - I’m happy to spend the time initially to set things up correctly, I just want to know whats possible and what’s not possible so that I’m not trying to force the theme to do something its not capable of. Do you think something like AVADA will slow the site down because of all the extras it has?

Hi @Zaccc
Do you know of any good themes that will allow for some customisation without over complicating things?

Using Avada as an example - it is a pretty amazing them but -

  1. you are definitely going to have to add more plugins or write some extra code to get everything you want active esp. stuff like advanced taxonomy and ADP, and

  2. you probably will only use around 25% of what Avada is capable of/includes.

FYI ADP and image/content-heavy sites don’t tend to go hand in hand, but that aside I still think you could do most of what you want if you find a quick ‘portfolio’ type theme. That would leave you to:

  • find a way/plugin to extend taxonomy and filtering
  • find a plugin to help with the mark-up on product pages
  • find a plugin to sort the international pages

If you could find a theme that uses one of the big page builders like Elementor or WP Bakery then there are a host of gallery and creative plugins available

Thanks for you help @charlie4282

Do you have experience with theme support for builders like Elementor and WP Bakery?

I know I’m expecting a lot, I have experience with enterprise level CMS’ but they are way out of the question for our budget. I like WP because it’s so widely used and future changes want usually be a huge project that will cost thousands of dollars.

There are a lot.

In terms of well-known and respected themes (other than Avada!):

There are several of the best authors like @Mikado-Themes and @Edge-Themes amongst others behind https://qodeinteractive.com/theme-author/mikado-wordpress-themes/ and they do a lot of creative designs. these are big players and you can be sure that these themes will be well constructed and supported

Personally, I rate @tommusrhodus @fuelthemes @greatives and @colabrio on a par with anyone else and always worth looking at their items.

I personally prefer Elementor but WP Bakery has been around longer and has the most add-ons (look on codecanyon)

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I have made about 30 sites with Enfold template. It is easy to use , they gave great and fast support and regular updates.

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