Theme Spotlight: Pinboard
Pinboard is a graphically-focused theme inspired by the Pinterest social media site as well as your favorite cork bulletin board. It is one of a number of themes available for personal, club, and organization websites hosted on sites.lafayette.edu. The theme isn’t available for department and program websites hosted on Depts and Forge.
The theme features a block layout in which posts are stacked on top of one another. If the post has a featured image (and this theme practically demands that you use featured images), then the image appears on top of the post’s header and intro blurb.
One of its most compelling features is its carousel, which allow you to highlight important posts. To do so the post needs to have a large feature image set — preferably at 1140×395 pixels — and needs to be published as “sticky”.
There’s plenty of theme customization that you can do through WordPress’s standard “Appearance -> Customize” menu, including adding widgets, specifying menus, adding logos, and setting background images, but the real power of the theme is accessed through its “Appearance -> Theme Options” menu. This gives you access to all of the theme’s advanced options, including tabs for “General”, “Design”, “Layout”, “Typography”, and “Search Engine Optimization”.
The theme offers a number of layout options including full width, no sidebars, and sidebar left/right. All of the content areas — main content, sidebar, and footer — can have 2-4 columns. Find these options at “Appearance -> Theme options -> Layout”.
Pinboard has build in social media support. You can specify links to your accounts on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, and other social media sites, which then appear in the website’s header. You can also turn on social sharing, which adds sharing buttons to the site’s various pages and posts. Find these options at “Appearance -> Theme options -> General”.
If you’re someone who loves to tweak font settings, Pinboard obliges with its extensive “Typography” settings page (“Appearance -> Theme options -> General”). It lets you specify which fonts and sizes for headings and body text as well a colors for just about every text component within the theme, including headings, links, navigation links, widgets, and footers.
The theme only supports a single menu, located in the header, but it does allow for nested dropdown menus using WordPress’ standard menu system. The site is responsive, and works equally well on desktop, tablet, and mobile devices.
Need some inspiration? Check out these websites at Lafayette that leverage Pinboard: