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Use Prose to Put the Focus on Your Words

September 15, 2010 by ·

image of microscopeWelcome to the Prose theme for the Genesis WordPress Framework! The Prose theme was designed to highlight your words with a clean, simple design that calls attention to the text.

Design matters

Sometimes writers think that design and communication are separate. That it’s the writer’s job to communicate with well-chosen words, and then the designer’s job to “make it pretty.”

Design is actually much more important than that.

The right design doesn’t just look good. It actually communicates something important to your readers.

  • Good design conveys your authority. Professional design shows your commitment to your audience, and that you aren’t some “fly by night” who slapped a site together.
  • Good design enhances your content without drawing attention away from it. You don’t want your readers to say, “what a great-looking design.” You want them to say, “what a remarkably useful blog, I’m going to read this every day.”
  • Good design allows you to highlight what matters most to you. Clean, open design with plenty of white space allows the ads and images you choose to stand out on the page.

Good design always serves the needs of the project. A wonderful theme for a photography blog would be the wrong choice for most writers. A craft shop owner has very different needs from a real estate agent.

Smart theme design takes into account what you’ll be using your site for, and supports your purpose beautifully.

You want some flexibility

Even though you may not consider yourself primarily a designer, you still want some flexibility.

Maybe your readers prefer a larger font. Maybe you have a gorgeous custom header and perfectly shows who you are and how you work. You probably have certain colors you’ve chosen to reflect your individual brand.

That’s why we built design controls into Prose. What are design controls? They let you change simple things about the appearance of your site (like colors and fonts) without knowing anything about coding, PHP, CSS, HTML, or any other abbreviations.

If you can click and drag, you can customize Prose.

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About Annie

Annie Anderson is a writer and graphic designer @asaMedia Labs. In her spare time, she enjoys reading, biking, cats, books, the ocean, travel, cooking and she's been known to drink way too much coffee. ;-) Oh, and don't forget the chocolate!

  • Brian Gardner

    This is an example of a comment made on a post. You can either edit the comment, delete the comment or reply to the comment. Use this as a place to respond to the post or to share what you are thinking.

    • Brian Gardner

      This is an example of a nested threaded comment which is new in WordPress 2.7. This is where you can reply to a comment that was previously made, and visually makes reading comments to much easier.

    • Penelope Prose

      I love threaded comments! They make readers feel like they’re truly part of a community, not just an “information site.” And that translates to more engaged customers and better profits.

  • Brian Gardner

    This is an example of a comment made on a post. You can either edit the comment, delete the comment or reply to the comment. Use this as a place to respond to the post or to share what you are thinking.

    • Brian Gardner

      This is an example of a nested threaded comment which is new in WordPress 2.7. This is where you can reply to a comment that was previously made, and visually makes reading comments to much easier.

      • Penelope Prose

        As users keep replying to each other, or you keep replying to them, the comments will “nest” like this. Pretty neat!

  • Brian Gardner

    This is an example of a comment made on a post. You can either edit the comment, delete the comment or reply to the comment. Use this as a place to respond to the post or to share what you are thinking.