The Starting Line – A Beginner’s Guide to Developing a Stylishly Minimalistic WordPress Site

Less is definitely more! Minimalism is all the rage at the moment.

With the minimalistic style gaining popularity in home decor, kitchen design, fashion and even art, it is no wonder that a stylish and minimalistic WordPress site is what everyone is aiming for these days. Once upon a time, flash imagery, large banners and colourful text was what every website boasted.

Step into today’s world and you’ll realise that designs on websites have toned down, colours have been kept to a minimal and neat and tidy seems to be the style that everyone is trying to achieve. If you are looking into starting a WordPress website of your own, here is our expert WP Development team’s guide to developing a stylishly minimalistic WordPress site.

  1. Choose Your Theme

A great WordPress website always starts off with a fantastic theme.

The theme that you choose will be the backbone and structure of all things design related on your website. Of course, the more in depth the theme goes, the better, as you will be able to further customise your website on your own in the future. Below are three of our favourite minimalist themes that we have come across. Any of these themes would be a fantastic start in building your minimalistic website.

Kalium

Kalium is a fantastic minimalistic theme that doesn’t only look great, but also comes with a massive amount of flexibility and functionality. Kalium is one theme that is absolutely bursting with options. Kalium gives you 11 demo templates to choose from and a wealth of portfolio and blog layouts at your disposal. This theme also comes with the Slider Revolution plugin which can be used tastefully to enhance your website’s design.

In addition, this theme also allows you to choose from an extensive range of 800 Google Fonts as well as a full colour palette. Anyone who is looking for a minimalistic yet super stylist website should definitely look into the Kalium theme.

Soledad

Soledad is a visually appealing, uncluttered and highly functional theme on WordPress.

This is a powerful and flexible theme that has been painstakingly built, resulting in a very polished theme that combines the minimalist philosophy with functionality. Soledad is a theme that could easily adapt itself to become a fashion blog, a food blog or an online business. This theme is one that is  fast-loading, resourceful and search engine optimized out of the box, with no coding background required whatsoever – perfect for the WordPress beginner.

This theme also comes inclusive of HTML5 features such as Featured Video Background, 3 different and impressive Portfolio styles, 5 Article Layout options and 3 Sidebar Layout options.

Gillion

Gillion is our third minimalist theme of choice, and is an incredibly easy to use WordPress theme. With quick and easy set up, thanks to a detailed documentation and carefully structured code, Gillion is the perfect theme for showcasing your work in an elegant yet efficient way. This theme is free from any distracting details or unnecessary effects that may drive visitors attention away from your main focus on the blog.

This theme is also SEO and translation friendly to help drive traffic to your website. Furthermore, Gillion is optimised to load quickly on all major desktop and mobile browsers. One of the added perks with this theme is that is comes with full customer support, so should anything go wrong, you can rest assured that there is someone who will help you with your issues. Again, this is perfect for a WordPress beginner who may not have extensive knowledge on how WordPress works, or who is prone to perhaps making some errors when it comes to customising your website.

  1. Choose Plugins That Compliment Your Theme

Now that you have chosen your theme, you will want to make sure that any plugins you install on your website also match the website in terms of aesthetics. There is no point in having a gorgeous website with unsightly sharing buttons or sign up boxes that stick out like a sore thumb. Below are a few handy WordPress plugins that are easily customised to the look of your website.

Simple Share Buttons Adder

Simple Share Buttons Adder is a great plugin that adds social media share buttons to your website. The great thing about this share button plugin is that you are able to customise the look of your share buttons, ensuring that they fit in perfectly with the aesthetic of your website.

Minimalist Twitter Widget

Minimalists Twitter Widget displays user tweets using the REST API v1.1. This is a great way to add a Twitter widget to your website in a stylish way. With minimal styling it picks up your theme’s styling to blend in seamlessly. With efficiency in mind this widget can also cache your Tweets reduce the amount of API calls your website has to make and to load quicker.

Disqus

Disqus is a fantastic third party plugin that will allow your visitors to leave comments on your posts. The great thing about Disqus is that it automatically checks your site’s font and background color and adapts to either a light or dark color scheme, along with a serif or sans-serif font. If these are detected incorrectly, you can override them in your Settings. With Disqus, you will never have to deal with unsightly comment boxes ever again.

  1. Keep Content Looking Elegant

One of the last points when it comes to developing a stylishly minimalistic WordPress site is to make sure that your content matches in style with your website’s theme. There is no point in an elegant theme if your content and imagery is not going to match it.

All the photography on your blog should be in line with the minimalist mindset. Less is more, and that is exactly the guideline by which your content and imagery should be crafted around. For more ideas on exactly how to go about maintaining a minimalistic site, have a look at these fantastic examples.

With these tips in mind, we are sure that you will succeed in building a stylish and minimalistic website of your own.