Ashford is built to be as simple as possible to administer and packed with powerful features. Often themes look great in the screen shots or in demos, but are difficult to use in the real world.
Ashford site eats its own dog food. Every feature needed on this site is built into Ashford. If you see it here, you can build it:
- Add a hero image to any page without using custom fields
- Create a simple and sexy content carousel page
- Automagically add thumbnail images to your blog
- Build effortless FAQ pages
- Get painless Lightbox affects for images (download the Ashford Lightbox plugin)
Overview
Ashford is a 2 column, widget-ready, gravatar enabled, WordPress Theme that packed with features typically found on premium themes.
- Admin-In-Place makes it as simple as possible to build and maintain your site including showing common WordPress functions at the top of the page and Hints to help you visually build a page.
- Theme Options build your site without having edit PHP or modify template code.
- Child themes give you the power to customize the look and feel of your site without giving up any features. You can power dozens of sites with Ashford as your parent theme, customize each one to match your requirements skinning it with a child theme.
- Search Engine Optimized (SEO) code and features that achieve proven results.
Build sites from top to bottom
- Write custom front page title, keyword and descrition meta tags
- Dymanically optimized robots meta tags
- Use a static page for front page and publish a blog
- Replace site name and tagline with header image (e.g. logo)
- Build main menu with pages or turn it off
- Add dynamic mulit-level drop downs
- Add a RSS icon and link to main navigation
- Add search box to main navigation
- Add a top level category subnavigation menu
- Smart breadcrumbs added to all pages
- Replace standard RSS feed with Feedburner URL
- Add “follow me” Twitter widget
- Add related pages to publish all children of the current page
- Add speed dial buttons at the bottom of page
- Build the page footer with widgets
- Add custom copyright/license text
- Add Google Analytics
Grow site by engaging readers
- Thumbnail images added to your blog without using custom fields
- Add a hero image to any page or post on you site without using custom fields
- Over a dozen page templates including table of contents or FAQs
- Add custom CSS to any page
- Sexy and easy to use AJAX carousel template
- Blog posts dynamically include “related” content using thumbnail images, categories and tags
- Author box added to all blog post pages
- Comments display gravatars
- Insert custom text ads into RSS summaries
Features that make developers happy
- Adminbar displays number of mySQL queries and seconds for each page
- HTML markup validates as XHTML Strict
- CSS uses a 16 column grid system based on Nathan Smith’s 960.gs
- jQuery is used to abstract behaviors from the markup
- Custom widgets come pre-loaded with theme
- No plug-ins are required
- Optimized for child theme development