See More about Working with Themes
Basic Principles
In all my years working with various CMS (content management systems) where themes written by someone else are available, I have never found a perfect theme. The purpose of using themes is to avoid the cost of custom design and the custom coding to implement that design.
Since there are thousands of themes, it can take a significant amount of time to find the one that best matches the needs of your site. And, you should do this work knowing that it is unlikely that there is such a thing as a theme that perfectly matches your needs.
With those thoughts in mind, let’s look at how the Kahuna theme does not meet my website needs in the home page photo area under the slider. The first thing to know is that, while you can choose how many Featured Boxes you want and how many rows you want them in, they can only pick up posts. I want them to pick up categories. For that to happen, I would have to override the code in a child theme.
In an earlier post, I discussed the communication and visual issues with the graphics chosen as Featured Images that show up at the top of the Featured Boxes. There is an additional issue with the Featured Boxes.
I want the Featured Boxes to each lead to a Category, not a Posts. Can I use one post to represent each Category? How could I communicate that each box is a different Category/topic if they are just posts? I know that the Featured Boxes pulls from a specific Category. I chose for it to pull from the Home Page Featured Boxes category. Could I use the Featured Images for each post to represent a Category by adding text in the image?
Using Images to Indicate Categories
For companies with a graphic artist available, I can let them make the decision of how to create a graphic that will express each category clearly. But, I don’t, so it took a significant amount of fiddling and fussing, aka, experimentation to achieve the desired image communication outcome. But, that is the topic for another post!