A WordPress build with a strict no-animation rule

A consulting firm's site built on a bought education theme, with one firm instruction from the client: nothing on the page should slow it down.

The objective

The client had bought an education theme and wanted it installed and reworked for a consulting business, with a home page and four inner pages.

One line in the brief shaped everything else: no animation, nothing that would drag down page load. Themes like that ship with sliders and animation libraries switched on by default, so meeting the brief was mostly a matter of taking things out, not putting them in.

They also wanted a plain wordmark instead of the university-style logo the theme came with.

What I did

I installed and customised the theme, then stripped out the slider and the animations it turned on by default.

I built a simple text logo to replace the theme's, and put together the home page and the rest to their content, leaving placeholders where photographs were still to come.

The hosting server sat in another country and was slow to answer at random points during the build, so I worked around it as it came up.

The result

The site launched on the theme they'd bought, minus the parts of it that would have made it slow.