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SOLVED RocketTheme philosopy: Missing template for text-heavy sites

    • Ironhand's Avatar
    • Ironhand
    • Sr. Rocketeer
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    SOLVED RocketTheme philosopy: Missing template for text-heavy sites

    Posted 5 years 10 months ago
    • Hello RT and everybody else :D

      I've been a customer here for Years. Since February 2009.

      RT themes are great and the support one of the best there is.

      What I have been missing lately is a bigger diversity in the templates.

      Frankly, the templates are more and more looking like template for a photographers online show.
      They all look great but depend heavily on photos etc. On a bad day I would say: "Too much eyecandy. IRL the templates start to take too much time to adapt for my customers needs."

      I've been building more webshops with RT themes lately. I still wonder why the RT team never create a practical and good looking "Terms & Condition" page? Or many other text-heavy pages? I am talking about more of the unsexy stuff.

      I am starting to question the RT philosopy here. I find myself spending more and more time to customize the template for "real life use".

      I miss more diversity and focus on template. Like templates specific built for webshops - including cool features for relevant stuff like "Terms and Conditions". Or other templates for text-heavy pages (e.g. good looking template for a medical company) etc.

      I think you get the point :)

      Example: VERSLA Theme
      I love the look of the Versla theme. Ok - strange it is fixed to Snipcart, but hey - RT would sure make the pludin flexible to work with other webshops. That was not the case.
      Also - for a webshop theme I was hoping for more cool "Price Overview" designs and flexibility. This was not the case.
      Or maybe some cool way to make a great "Term and Condition" page (by know you must hate me for bringing that up again). Also not present.
      Or some nice 404-error page with link to soem product, or a great search field for products, or some nice solution for payed downloadable content or something. Also not the case. Basically it is a normal template with 1 Snipcart plugin. That's it.

      Also about the text-heavy thing :)
      Look at some of the old templates like Afterburner and older. They were designed to handle more text.

      I am well aware that it has technical and historical reason (bandwith, trends etc.).

      But still... boring stuff like "Terms and Conditions" or more text-heavy pages (like if you want to sell aeroplanes) need a lot of twerking to make look good because it is not in the RT DNA anymore.

      Just one example: Many Gantry plugins cannot handle "long headlines" before the repsonsive design breaks. And the long headlines I talk about might be 4 or 5 words. Sometimes much less.

      You are doing a great work and this is not a rant.
      I just wish sometimes that the Webdesigners at RT would try out some new challenges like "this time we make a killer webshop template" or "we make text heavy pages look good" or something like that :D

      It seems that images are the foundation you need to make pages look good.

      There is some kind of anti-climax once you have installed the Rocketlauncher version and load the page - and all images are missing. Then you see the "real template" for the first time and the workload ahead of you. I'd wish that RT once in a while would take on that view and develop practical solutions. Like "font auto resize checkbox" for all gantry plugins. To make the headlines etc. responsible. RT has many international customers and if you write stuff in English if often can be written shortly. But in many other languages the same text take up much more space. (Sorry - teh "font auto resize function" this was just one example. I have many more. Mostly small improvement with focus on quickly customizing and adapting templates for end customers.).

      I am trying to look into Grav now since I think I can customize it better and faster than Joomla. Am I correct in that assumption?

      :)
    • Last Edit: 5 years 10 months ago by Ironhand.
    • MrT's Avatar
    • MrT
    • Preeminent Rocketeer
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    • Web Designer/Developer

    Re: SOLVED RocketTheme philosopy: Missing template for text-heavy sites

    Posted 5 years 10 months ago
    • I'll pass along your comments to the DEVS.

      But perhaps you missed this recent announcment http://www.rockettheme.com/forum/general-discussion/276431-major-announcement-concerning-existing-g4-themes . Some of those "old themes" that you love so much will be converted to work on Gantry 5 (GRAV, Wordpress and Joomla).

      Regards, Mark.
    • The following users have thanked you: Ironhand

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    • Ironhand's Avatar
    • Ironhand
    • Sr. Rocketeer
    • Posts: 166
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    Re: SOLVED RocketTheme philosopy: Missing template for text-heavy sites

    Posted 5 years 10 months ago
    • Thanks Mark - and I look forward to the conversion.

      I only rant (a little) because I would hate using other templates. To be honest: The superb support here is 75% of the reason I think the RT templates are something special :)
    • Ryan M Pierson's Avatar
    • Ryan M Pierson
    • Sr. Rocketeer
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    • Technical Writer

    Re: SOLVED RocketTheme philosopy: Missing template for text-heavy sites

    Posted 5 years 10 months ago
    • Ironhand wrote:
      I've been a customer here for Years. Since February 2009.

      Thank you for being a customer for so long! We're very happy to have you with us.
      Ironhand wrote:
      What I have been missing lately is a bigger diversity in the templates. Frankly, the templates are more and more looking like template for a photographers online show.

      You have a point there. Our demos usually show off everything about it that has to do with images. However, usually what ends up happening, is that a developer will pick a couple image-centric particles and replace the rest with text. Our demos are largely one-sided, though. I see your point.
      Ironhand wrote:
      I've been building more webshops with RT themes lately. I still wonder why the RT team never create a practical and good looking "Terms & Condition" page? Or many other text-heavy pages? I am talking about more of the unsexy stuff.

      There's actually a whole section of the demos in Gantry 5 templates that plays with that. Take a look at the Layouts area of the main menu. For example: http://demo.rockettheme.com/live/joomla/denali/sample-layouts/fullwidth

      You can get an idea of what a text-heavy page would look like, and we even include these layouts in the presets. All of those are pretty much just text. Very rarely do we use images on those sample pages.
      Ironhand wrote:
      I am starting to question the RT philosopy here. I find myself spending more and more time to customize the template for "real life use".

      I'm sorry to hear that you're having that experience. We'll definitely be discussing this internally and see what we can come up with in the next few themes.
    • Last Edit: 5 years 10 months ago by Ryan M Pierson.
    • Ryan Matthew Pierson / Technical Writer / Buda, TX USA

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