Kim Hildebrand
Last Fall I had started my search for a new website. My WordPress-based Divi-theme website had worked fine for the last three years, but now looked clunky, confusing, and outdated.
1. One-time Payment
I looked at several companies and narrowed it down to two WordPress theme companies for creatives and photographers : Flothemes and Showit. While Showit is beautiful and has great reviews, it is subscription-based. Since I’ve already been extremely happy with my hosting company SiteGround and have a contract with them, I loved that I could purchase my Flothemes website and not pay an ongoing subscription.
2. User-Friendly
Flothemes comes out with new innovations and designs all the time, and has a really active blog and Facebook Group. They have demos for every single theme and many tutorials showing you how to use their new Flexthemes, which essentially make each section in your website fully-customizeable and *fancy* and *you*.
So when they had an amazing Cyber Monday deal going on that included migration, I jumped on it! Since I’m a photographer and don’t want to take the risk of migrating all my blog posts and other info, I wanted to have the folks at Flothemes take care of that. I purchased the Lyra theme with professional installation.
From there, I filled out a little questionnaire giving them the details of how I wanted my new website to look, what key images to include, the menu options and order, blog design, and more. Then I got back to work on my business. In two weeks, they contacted me and set up a Skype call to talk about my new website. Their customer service was outstanding!
While I still had to build out the new pages on my website, the old website was up and running so I wasn’t losing out on any business. I could go into my WordPress admin site, turn on the switch to build out my new website, save, then continue tweaking as I had time.
3. Highly-Customizeable with Flexthemes
One key feature I absolutely love about Flothemes are their new Flexthemes blocks. Flexthemes is basically a big blank slate where you can add video, photos, text, links, or a combination of all of those things, including overlapping anything you want, like text over photos, videos, offsetting text with quotes, and more. AND the other cool feature they just added with Flexthemes, is that you can automatically have your layout mirrored for the highly-responsive mobile version of your website.
I didn’t use Flexthemes for all my blocks, as the existing Lyra template comes with so many pre-designed yet customizeable blocks for the homepage, blog page, contact pages, educational pages, and more. I also loved that I could mix-and-match blocks from one example design with another.
4. Ease-of-Use
I am a creative individual. A dreamer. A photographer. Not a website designer. And I have never built a website faster than my Flothemes website. It only took me 2 weeks from the time the migration was done to the time I launched my site! Seriously. Any time I had questions I could view one of many video tutorials they have embedded in their FloLaunch plugin so I didn’t even have to search for it online. And if I couldn’t find an answer there, I could check the support site or ask the FB group (where even Nata and Flo – the founders – are answering questions often).
From a design standpoint, their pre-built themes are beautifully laid out with complimentary fonts and colors that work well together. The blocks have grids and rulers so you can make sure your content looks well-balanced (and same with the easy-to-manipulate mobile site).
5. Set it and Forget it
Once I launched my website, I had one last call with Flothemes to answer any final questions, do a website speed check, and look for any red flags. My website has never been faster or more responsive (or professional). The user experience is more clear and easy to understand. My clients can easily find the information they are looking for. My web traffic has increased dramatically and I’ve gotten a lot of positive feedback.
I feel confident moving forward that as Flothemes keeps improving features and functionality, I will always be able to keep up with the latest trends easily and with lots of support.
Flothemes is currently offering $90 off any theme ($199 instead of $279) because they believe in helping you get noticed online. Now is the time to update your website while we are all at home!
Feel free to reach out to me if you have any questions and stay safe, stay well.