Sean and I made this site for hdesign back in the Summer of 2023.
This was actually one of the last projects we built using the X Pro theme. I know, I know, we kept using this theme for an unreasonably long time. I was using the X theme, and especially X Pro, mostly out of laziness to be honest. The Pro license came bundled with Slider Revolution, as well as WP Bakery (formerly Visual Composer) and things like ACF Pro – so unfortunately, if you’re not looking to reinvent the wheel and you have a client who’s being very specific about what they want – and what they want sounds very much like a standard template of the time, then reaching for something like X Pro is an easy solution.
To be fair, we spent a lot of time at Design House using Slider Revolution, which I still defend to this day. Generally speaking we’re more inclined to do our own thing with GSAP these days, but when you have some basic requirements and client’s asked for a basic banner mechanism, you can do worse than Slider Revolution.
We’ve since completely done away with WP Bakery though. Trying to teach clients how to use separate boxes in the backend of the site was always a struggle, and I figured that it was an acceptable level of understanding for them to have – BUT, and it took me a long time to realise this, clients cannot handle more than 2 or 3 clicks in the backend of their site before they get lost and frustrated, and WP Bakery is a bloody nightmare on so many levels these days. I wish I’d canned it off sooner, but there we are.
Potentially this will get remade further down the line with more custom fields and simplified/smoother mechanisms. The overall goal these days seems to be usability and ease of editing for the client – which means removing obstacles and buttons rather than adding them.
But, it this one still looks good, it does exactly what the client requested. The budget was pretty lean and mean, and the site’s not doing anything terribly complex. So it is what it is. It looks nice I think.
Branding is simple but elegant, and plays off the expectations of the industry I think.
Interior Designers are an interesting bunch, locked somewhere between being truly creative and delivering expectations and trends. Maybe the same is true of website designers to be fair!
Anyway, this one still looks nice. Built in 2023, so it’s not that old. Looks like it could be a very high quality wix or squarespace site at the end of the day. Not that that’s an inherently bad thing.
It’s not breaking the mould, but it looks pretty cool, shows the work of nicely, and performs great on desktops and mobiles. That’s what they wanted! That’s what they got!
