Reply To: Some direction on demo code you used for homepage

All of the widgets in the demo are just basic Text Widgets. The Welcome widgets as well as the widgets right below are also just basic images and text. Example, here is what was typed inside the first welcome widget –

<img src="http://demo.appfinite.com/epik/img/w-cloud.png">
<h4>Mobile Responsive Design</h4>
Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipisicing elit.

The other 2 Welcome widgets are exactly the same. We didn’t use any plugins or anything, so it’s not anything complex, just basic text that includes an image. If you know how to add an image using html (example above) and if you know how to add a header title (example above) then that’s all that is really needed in order to duplicate that part of the demo.

From reading the rest of your post, it appears you may have the wrong idea about the way this works, and I’d love to clear this up for you so you can see just how easy it really is to setup a basic site. All Genesis themes including StudioPress themes are developed this way. These themes are definitely not “bare” in any way at all. Adding a “warning” like what you mentioned would be completely unnecessary and is an exaggeration in this case (I’m hoping that you were just kidding). You may be new to Genesis/WordPress/HTML, but please don’t make the assumption that this will be “hard”, because that’s simply not the truth in any way whatsoever. It definitely wouldn’t take 6 months to setup a theme….even as a beginner (again, I hope that was a joke).

I’ve had plenty of beginners get started and make great looking sites, and these people weren’t developers. When I got started with Genesis, I wasn’t a developer and I was still able to get things done since I simply followed the tutorials. This is a fully functional theme that is designed and ready for you to add in your own content. Think of it as buying a house. The house is already built from the ground up, but it’s up to YOU to add your own furniture (content)….we can’t do that for you.

As mentioned before, this is a theme that can be setup by anyone regardless of their experience.  This is NOT just for developers, this theme is very easy to setup.  The demo content isn’t included because there currently isn’t an easy way to include the widget code in the XML file in the same way that the posts and pages are included in the demo. But the widgets can easily be added by simply following the tutorials. The entire demo can be duplicated within minutes by adding the code from the tutorial. As a matter of fact, it literally took under 10 minutes to setup the demo’s homepage…..especially since the code is repetitive. Each “left/right” code that you see is exactly the same, except it reverses widget after widget.

There is no specific way that the theme is “supposed” to look, you can design it the way that YOU want it to look. You have the control of adding whatever you want, which is a good thing since you’re not limited on what you can add. I’ve seen other themes that include all of the code that they’ve used in their demo which made it very limited and difficult to remove all of the code and images they added. This makes the process of adding your own design and content much harder and time consuming, not the other way around. Genesis themes aren’t built that way, and Genesis users prefer this since it takes much less time to add the content you want, rather than remove extra code that you don’t need. If I had to remove someone else’s code each time I wanted to setup a quick site, I would find a different way to do it, that would be way too time consuming. This is the reason I use Genesis. I simply activate the theme, and add in my content. It’s simple, its fast, and I have control to customize everything without anything getting in the way. As you get better and learn to code, you will understand and appreciate this way of designing/developing sites.

I haven’t loaded this site with a ton of tutorials because they already exist on the StudioPress site.  I assume you should know about the tutorials on StudioPress since you have to buy the Genesis Framework before you can use any of my themes.  I’m guessing you may have missed their tutorial and FAQ pages…..so here are a couple helpful links –

This is the Frequently Asked Questions page for Genesis – http://www.studiopress.com/faqs 

This is the Code Snippet section which will allow you to make customizations to Genesis as well as Child themes (like this one) – http://my.studiopress.com/snippets/

With the above links (including my own tutorials) you should have more than enough info to get whatever you need done.  After you’ve gone through them all (or what you need), I think you’ll have a much different view of how this works once you see just how easy this really is 😉

Remember, this is not JUST for developers, this is for any and everyone regardless of their skill……and if you have a question, or an issue, thats what the forums are for.  As you can clearly see, I’d be more than happy to help you succeed 🙂