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Ashford is developed to be as easy 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 is the FREE parent to the fully featured Ashford Pro. The free version is loaded with features, but not all are enabled.
Layouts
Custom Sidebars
Four exclusive features
If you are reading this page, you probably are comparing several different WordPress themes. Here is a list of things that you will not find on other themes or frameworks:
- Instant mobile without a separate theme or plug-in
- Mega menus build using widgets
- Built-in capability to run Google Web Site Optimizer A/B tests
- Add a Hero to any page without plug-ins
Features that non-developers will love
Ashford has over 33 theme options to configure your site. Plus, each page template has a Pro Settings panel allowing you to build over 250 page variations. Then Ashford allows you to upload custom backgrounds and headers. You can do all this customization without knowing HTML, PHP, CSS or JavaScript.
- Write custom front page title, keyword and description meta tags
- Automatically optimized robots meta tags without a plug-in
- Use a static page for front page and publish a blog
- Use custom headers to replace site name and tag-line with an image (e.g. logo)
- Use custom backgrounds to add image and color to your background
- Build dynamic, hierarchical navigation main menu with pages
- Use widgets to build a mega menu
- Add a “site stripe” across every page and post on the site
- Add a “page stripe” at the top of any page
- Add a Twitter, Facebook and/or RSS icons to main navigation
- Add search box to main navigation
- Add a top level category sub-navigation menu
- Display smart breadcrumbs on all pages
- Use threaded comments with Gravatars
- Display an author box on any page
- Display popular social sharing icons
- Display related posts
- Replace standard RSS feed with Feedburner URL
- Add “follow me” Twitter widget
- Add related pages widget to publish all children of the current page
- Use gravatar comments widget to show who commented
- Get advanced pagination
- Add category based speed dial buttons at the bottom of page
- Build the bottom sidebar with widgets
- Add custom copyright/license text
- Add Google Analytics
- Fill out extended User profile fields for amazing author pages
- Support documents written for non-coders
Features developers will love
Coders do not need theme options or advanced page settings panels. Instead, they need a stable theme framework to rapidly develop robust sites. But their non-coder clients will love all the features above ↑
The Ashford CSM framework allows coders to custom build sites without plug-ins. This results in a deliverable that is stable, upgradable and secure.
Ashford sites can then be turned over to clients with confidence that all browsers are supported (including mobile), code is performant, themes are extensible and code is upgradable. Developers using Pro always have access to supp0rt, experts and new releases. They also influence and guide the development road map.
- Theme enables all the features offered by WordPress 3+
- Code is in active development
- Releases are frequent
- New features are added without bloat
- Ashford developer community is fully engaged
- 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 theme
- No plug-ins are required to go mobile
- Optimized for child theme development with over 20 action hooks
- Dev documentation written for coders