Insite Starter is a WordPress starter theme developed by Insite Website Design and Development. We use it as a base upon which to build custom themes for our clients.
As a development tool, Insite Starter takes full advantage of Bootstrap, upon which it is built. All of the styling classes, grid layouts, javascript and components of Bootstrap are available to developers and themers using Insite Starter as a base to build a custom theme.
Insite Starter is a “plain vanilla”, minimally styled theme. But it is carefully refined and completely outfitted. It is easy to turn it into any type of design or layout needed for any project.
Here at Insite Website we typically start new projects by installing WordPress using a “Duplicator” package of the Insite Starter website. This jump-starts the project by instantly installing WordPress with our base theme, our most-used plugins, our “Typography” page which serves as a reference document and theming tool, and a simple Contact form.
Our Typography page serves as a reference guide — all standard and many less-used HTML elements have already received style treatments — and provides a worksheet for themers to adapt with the required typography styles of their new site. We’ve refined many “built in” Bootstrap style classes, and added many additional classes which we find ourselves returning to repeatedly, job after job. Our refinements are applied to details like the appearance of off-site and PDF links, as well as tables, lists, blockquotes and much more.
We make use of the Contact Form 7 plugin, and wrap it in Bootstrap styles for easy development of our Contact page and other forms which may be used in our sites.
Insite Starter comes with a custom javascript file which ties tightly into our theme. Our scripts are always aware of the current Bootstrap “break point” and dynamically apply body classes indicating the screen width and screen orientation to help themers code responsively. Scripting can easily be applied for different screens individually and dynamically. We also provide a visual indicator (for logged in admins only) so they can see at a glance which breakpoint they are currently viewing the site at.
Our theme functions provide a useful toolbox of curated and custom functions designed to make our sites operate smoothly and securely. They help make our sites more user-friendly on both the front- and back-ends. Image sizes are already set up to match Bootstrap breakpoints; the WordPress “text” editor is tricked out for site administrators; security modifications follow WordPress best practices. Developers and themers should review our functions.php file and its sub-files to enable and disable the features which appeal to them.
One of the functions.php sub-files is a carefully built out enqueue protocol for loading assets most effectively. Tweak as needed!
Use of the WordPress “Customizer” is discouraged; easy access to it from the admin area is turned off. We believe that the web designer should be making and implementing all decisions about the site’s style, as well as keeping all style rules in one place: the stylesheet. When “anyone can be a web disigner,” the Customizer provides needless opportunity for fat thumbs to hurt more than they help. We assume that the web design team can make all necessary changes through other channels. You can easily re-enable Customizer via in our theme functions, if you must.
