ThemeFlood.

Something a bit different. Stream is a magazine-style theme for RapidWeaver, making it ideally suited towards content-heavy websites. This theme purposefully opts for a more condensed style, so you can fit more content on pages and require less scrolling. Like a page in a magazine, content is designed to be split-up into smaller blocks or columns. Headings and floating images or video allow you to create sophisticated page designs, which remain friendly and easy for people to read. A simple navigation system is used in this theme, so completed websites are easy for your visitors to navigate.

Stream is a theme that has been used for all sorts of different purposes. In the past it has been used for news websites and blogs. Stream is a popular choice with educators, business owners and people in the legal profession. A few successful e-commerce websites have also been built using Stream. More recently, I've seen an excellent example of a real estate website built using Stream. Don't let the initial 'drab and dreary' appearance of this theme put you off! A broad range of both theme style and colour settings are built in already, giving you the flexibility to build distinctive websites to a professional standard.

Optional page banners in this RapidWeaver theme are achieved using the FreeStyle technique. A dedicated theme style setting is provided, letting you turn these banners on or off. The FreeStyle banner automatically resizes to fit the content. FreeStyle banners can be used for static images, slideshows or even video. 30 example banner images are included with the theme; these all being photographs reproduced from scanned slides, taken by my late grandfather. Images 1 - 20 are from Switzerland in 1983, images 20 - 30 are random images taken during the 1970's and 1980's. Feel free to use these images or replace them with your own. If you need more images of a particular subject, let me know.

Like many other ThemeFlood themes, Stream incorporates the complete Twitter Bootstrap toolkit, plus Font Awesome More icons. Bootstrap provides you with a 'sweetshop' of design and interface elements; distributed in the form of RapidWeaver code snippets and available to drag and drop straight into pages. Font Awesome More is an open source library of over 300 vector icons. These icons are embedded in the form of web fonts, ensuring icons are retina-enabled and can also be customised using basic CSS code.

Page loading speed is an important factor when building any website. End users want pages that load fast and there is some evidence to suggest that search engines also use page speed as a factor now, when ranking pages. Using a theme like Stream, you can't really go wrong! Stream is highly optimised for speed, and does things differently to many other RapidWeaver themes. In Stream, we optimise a lot of code and ensure it is compatible with CSS consolidation and compression preferences in RapidWeaver. We also do things like deferring theme Javascript loads, until the end of the page. All of these actions combined can result in page loading scores into the nineties range.

As you would expect, Stream uses valid HTML5 code for its framework. Stream is a responsive RapidWeaver theme and adapts for display on different screen sizes, including desktop, tablet and smart phone. This theme incorporates RAFT (responsive adaptive framework for themes), giving you a user-friendly navigation structure on smaller handheld devices, and a great selection of options for adjusting how pages look and work on smaller screen sizes. As well as looking great on different screen sizes, websites built using Stream also print very nicely too!

It is strongly recommended you download and install the free demo version for this RapidWeaver theme, and play around with it yourself. There are lots of useful theme colour and style variations included. You might be surprised at what this theme can do.