We’re excited to announce the release of our latest WordPress theme, Forward. It’s been designed with NGO’s and non-profits in mind to help them quickly and easily create a web presence that impacts their visitors. Here are some of the highlights of the theme.
Useful Functionality
Some WordPress themes cram everything that any user could possibly ever need into theme, without a lot of thought given to whether or not this is a good thing. That approach leaves the user with potentially hundreds of settings that must be selected before the theme can be used. To me that seems like a mistake.
With Forward we wanted it to work great immediately upon installation. There are options for colors, fonts, logos and so on in the customizer, but you don’t have to use any of them. They really are “options” as in optional.
The best themes are the ones that you install and get to the real work of creating your content. Forward makes that happen.
It’s also our first theme that doesn’t have a traditional theme options page at all. Everything is set via the customizer now, which I believe gives you a much better experience setting up your site. You can preview your changes as you make selections live before committing them to the front end of your site.
Useful Tools
Real themes for organizations come with tools to help you achieve your goals. With that in mind, we’ve included our campaign extension for WooCommerce. It allows you to run fundraising campaigns on your site and collect donations right there as well.
We’ve also built in a MailChimp widget that allows your visitors to subscribe to a newsletter right from any widget area in the theme. There is also a handy contact widget that you can use to share you contact information and a map to your location.
We pioneered staff sections in WordPress themes back with the release of our Agency theme and that functionality is here in Forward as well. You can create staff directories to introduce your visitors to the key people in your organization.
You can also use the sponsors section to express your gratitude to the organizations that support you. It has a widget, page template and optional sponsor groups that you can use to create listings of those who have given support to you.
So I hope you enjoy our Forward theme. I believe it can be a real benefit to organizations, large and small.
This content was originally published here.