ThemeFlood.

Introduction

At first glance, you would probably question why you need a theme like Flood in your collection. After all, it looks rather bland and boring on the surface; not exactly a design that shouts at you. One word - minimalist. This is a design concept web designers all over the world are engaging with right now. Minimalist design is all about doing-away with unnecessary clutter. So rather than the website design taking precedence, minimalist design is all about reversing things and returning emphasis back to your content. Bottom-line; designers who understand the concept of minimalist design and can make it work in their projects are succeeding.

Less is more

Flood is very much a minimalist RapidWeaver theme. A simple header region, horizontal navigation, banner, two-column content region and a horizontal footer bar form the basic structure of this theme. Using provided theme settings, you can then go ahead and introduce up to four ExtraContent horizontal content containers, which slice the design up and span from edge-to-edge of the screen. Built-in column settings, the Stacks plugin or the Bootstrap grid then provide three other possible methods of slicing written content up into smaller bite-sized sections.

For websites with a heavy reliance on image content (like showcases, portfolios or e-commerce websites), Flood can work brilliantly. Once again you can choose to use virtually any page layout or slideshow plugin, to build sophisticated page designs. Or keep things simple using the normal content and sidebar regions.

Responsive

As you would expect, Flood is fully responsive. This theme displays content beautifully on large, cinematic monitors. On tablet devices the page layout scales smoothly to fit smaller screen sizes. Aspects of the design like the horizontal navigation (which would traditionally start to break on smaller screen sizes) reverts to a user-friendly toggle menu. The theme continues to scale down on smaller devices like smart phones, whereby columns and grids dissolve into a single column. Everything you need to build a cross-device-compatible website is here.

Style settings

Flood does not skimp on useful theme settings. Options exist to change just about every colour you see on screen using colour pickers, so you can devise custom colour schemes and match existing corporate branding. Settings are also provided to adjust body backgrounds, font styling, theme width, sidebar width and placement, and columns. Plus we also provide the option to easily toggle between a drop-down menu, block and split navigation layouts.

Be social

Social media plays a vital role in promoting businesses organically via a virtual word-of-mouth. We now spend more time than ever online, and many people engage with social media and bookmarking platforms to improve their online experience. With this in mind, Flood incorporates an option social bar container at the top of the page. This container (ExtraContent1) allows you to place useful links, icons and short extracts of information like contact details. The social bar styling can be adjusted and you can have the social fixed or static. You can also set the social box floating left or right as a box.

More power

For semi-expert RapidWeaver users, Flood provides a candy-shop of options to take your web-dev skills to the next level. To start with, Flood incorporates complete support for the entire Twitter Bootstrap Toolkit. This instantly empowers you and opens up vast avenues to incorporate various embellishments and page functionality. Have a look through the Bootstrap website to see what's feasible, and then download the free Bootstrap snippets pack, to use in RapidWeaver. Flood also incorporates the complete library of free Font Awesome 5 icons, so you can spice-up your page designs with simple vector icons which compliment the theme harmoniously.

That banner

Arguably the shinning beacon in this theme is the optional banner container. This banner utilises FreeStyle technology, so it's basically a blank canvas to do whatever you want with. Static images, sliders, carousels, slideshows and even video can be embedded into the banner region. Theme style settings are provided, enabling a choice of different banner borders to be applied. The banner is fully responsive and expands vertically to incorporate your content. As a bonus, a banner content container (ExtraContent5) provides a useful space to incorporate written content.

Dependable

Flood has been engineered as a robust RapidWeaver theme. It will work reliably on all modern web browsers. On older web browsers, the theme displays just as well, with some graceful degradation to cosmetics like shadow effects and rounded corners (basically the stuff that doesn't really matter). This theme uses an HTML5 doctype and validates as HTML5 valid. Work has been done to optimise the theme for search engines - such as wrapping headings inside heading tags, logo images that link back to the homepage automatically and navigation structures which are easy for search engines to access.

Faster pages

Speed is an important factor in modern web design. Sluggish websites typically gravitate people away and search engines recognise this, from an SEO perspective. Currently Flood is one of the most optimised RapidWeaver themes currently available anywhere, with much emphasis on building streamlined pages which load quickly and with less bandwidth. Using speed testing tools, it's not uncommon for pages built with Flood to achieve scores into the 80s and beyond. Try the live demo site to see for yourself.