Turning an award winning website into a powerful template theme

I transformed our award-winning website for Trinity at Left Bank apartments into a completely customizable template theme in order to streamline the leasing process for any multifamily property.

Expanding on the powerful Gutenberg block editor and customizer in WordPress, I created a product that allows even non–developers to set up, build, re-arrange, and customize websites to suit a variety of client needs in a fraction of the time.

The plan_

During the process of reworking the former Trinity at Left Bank website into a highly customizable WordPress theme, I included key enhancements, like making it more accessible, while retaining the award-winning features and core design of the original. The goal was to enable non-developers and even potential clients to establish an online presence for their property quickly and easily. I used powerful native WordPress tools to achieve this—by avoiding a finicky CMS or third-party page builders, we kept the experience as intuitive as possible, minimizing the learning curve.

Gutenberg
block editor_

I wanted to take full advantage of the WordPress Gutenberg block editor. Tapping into ACF’s powerful block-building toolset, and using the same pipeline we use for our custom site builds, I converted our existing codebase into individual blocks.

This also allowed us to leverage the modular nature of Gutenberg’s inherent page building capabilities to quickly recombine custom blocks, standard CMS elements, and a nearly endless library of extensions for amazing range of customization. Whether it’s a quick property re-branding, to completely custom client requests, virtually anything is possible!

See it in action_

This short demonstration walks you through how we quickly built a single-page version of our theme, completely changed the branding, and reset the look and feel in less than 10 minutes. (This video is sped up to 1:30min.)

The customizer_

It was crucial to turn around each new build quickly, and even more importantly, without the need for anyone having to write additional code.

With several years of experience building and maintaining nearly 100 similar multisite-based templates, I chose one of the most powerful tools WordPress has to offer: the customizer!

All of the theme’s stylings are achieved using utility classes fonts, and colors, as well as light and dark variants. It’s easy for anyone to completely plan, build, and customize a new version of the Boutique theme, and see the results in an instant.