marcomathieumedia changed its site theme to: ‘visual‘  (a theme released in 2013).
Desire to have a black surround to our images has been the driving force here.

After trying ‘piano black‘ (previous ‘website development’ blog) we quite happily remained with ‘sundance‘, enjoying the fresh, open, uncluttered feel, with large on-site video screens when preferred, and smaller ones along with a quite discreet side bar. Wonderful.

However, the desire to have a black frame to our images remained ever present. ‘Visual‘ was discovered by accident while building a site for another project. It did not match the total needs of that other project, but the more we experimented with ‘visual‘, the more we liked it.

Converting from ‘sundance‘ to ‘visual‘ required very few modifications.

1. We had to accept that the front page video slider is unavailable, so those featured videos are placed elsewhere, and they are listed under blog category, ‘featured’.
2. The headings, particularly in the side bar, were a bit small, so they were changed from small to medium without change of font.
3. Some blogs with long text (like this one) do not display well on the blog page – a blog summary layout which is really nice.  So, to fully utilize the theme’s careful attention to that feature, we added ‘read more’ separators.However we decided to add featured images’ for each video post: firstly it makes the summary look much more attractive, and secondly we can avoid viewers being tempted to play one of our HD videos in that little thumb-nail size, which kind of defeats our objective!

Why do we like ‘visual‘ so much?  (apart from the fact it is a free theme):

1. Black background and surround, position of menu buttons, header image position.
2. Side bar looks clean, and although larger than on ‘sundance‘, the video screens are also larger – so how is that possible?   Well, utilization of space is the answer, while ‘sundance‘ (and many others) have large spaces horizontally, ‘visual‘ uses this space to achieve larger side-bar and larger video screen on the same page. And perhaps because of the black, it doesn’t seem crowded.
3. The impression of green/turquoise characters over the black is very attractive. There are color options available, but for now we love the default.

What else? – watch this space as we discover !