Time for action—installing and configuring the Ari theme

Let’s try it out on the Carborelli’s site. To install and configure the Ari theme, perform the following steps:

  1. Download Ari from http://wordpress.org/extend/themes/ari and activate it on the Manage Themes options page. Let’s have a look at what it does to our site without any tweaks, on each of the desktop, iPad, and mobile. The following screenshot shows the Ari theme on the desktop:
    Time for action—installing and configuring the Ari theme

    The following screenshot shows how it looks on the iPad:

    Time for action—installing and configuring the Ari theme

    Finally, our site with the Ari theme on a mobile looks like the following screenshot:

    Time for action—installing and configuring the Ari theme

    As with Scherzo, there are some issues with wrapped text in the mobile version, but the changing column layouts are a nice touch across the different devices.

  2. The next step is to make some design and branding alterations, which we can do via the Theme Options screen. Change the color of the header text, the page background, and the body text if you want. You can also upload an image to use as the logo—this will replace the site name and description in the left-hand side column. So, let’s test it on the desktop first, as shown in the following screenshot:
    Time for action—installing and configuring the Ari theme

    Let’s now test this site on mobiles, as shown in the following screenshot:

    Time for action—installing and configuring the Ari theme

    Now we’re talking! With a few straightforward tweaks and no coding at all, we have a site that reflects the Carborelli’s branding, includes a logo, and is fully responsive. And I don’t know about you, but I think it looks a lot nicer than those mobile plugins, don’t you?

    (Hold that thought! We will come back to the interaction between responsive themes and mobile plugins shortly.)

What just happened?

We installed Ari and configured the options to create a responsive site that has quite a lot in common with our original desktop site. We saw how to do this by changing the background color and text color, and by uploading a logo.

Have a go hero

Now try installing Ari on your site, adding a logo and some custom color changes, and seeing how close you can get it to your desktop theme.

Codium Extend

Codium Extend is a development of the Codium responsive theme, which has been around for even longer than Scherzo—since October 2010—positively prehistoric in the world of responsive WordPress themes! It’s popular having had 61,601 downloads, and gives a mobile layout that’s different from the other two themes we’ve looked at. Let’s install it and see what it does.

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