When first installed, Twenty Fourteen doesn’t look much like what you anticipate from its pictures. Here are some quick steps to make it to shine:
Accessing the Settings
Once you’ve activated Twenty Fourteen, go to your dashboard, to Appearance>>Customize. Click on Customize (circled in red) to access the theme’s settings. You should see a panel like the snapshot pictured below.
Navigation
The Navigation settings are very similar to what you find on your dashboard. But here you can preview changes before saving them. You’ll still need to set up your menus in Appearance>>Menus. The theme provides two menus and you control where (and if) they are displayed.
Static Front Page
This setting probably looks familar to you if you’ve gone to the Settings>>Reading in the dashboard. But here you can use it to preview how such a change would affect you site’s home page. Basically, you decide here if you want your home page to display a number of your latest blog posts, or if you want it to display a static front page.
Featured Content
This is where you control what the featured area on you home page looks like. It could be totally non-existent, or a grid of boxes, or a slider. It will display your latest blog posts if they are tagged to be shown. The default tag – “featured” – can be changed to whatever tag you want. You can change your home page’s entire featured content area by just changing the tag name, and by deciding whether to display a slider, or a grid.
Featured Images
The theme relies heavily on featured images. The boxes in the grid will display the featured images of each post along with the post title, tags and other links. The slider will display your post’s featured images as well. Slider images need to be big, or else you might see a black area on the right (depending on device and monitor size). If you are using a full width page template to display your slider, the featured image’s width needs to be at least 1200px to look good on desktops. If you are using a template that also shows a sidebar, the width should be at least 1000px. Slider images scale down, but do not scale up. This might make transitioning from previous themes difficult.
If you choose to display your featured content in a grid, featured images can be smaller, but you still probably want them large enough to span the width of your page or post (at least 640px), when your readers click to see the actual content. (You can also experiment with different post formats to see how they display the featured image.)
You can set the featured image on both a page and a post. They display quite differently on different devices.
Dynamic Magazine Functionality
Twenty Fourteen offers a lot, but you can customize it further by changing its CSS or by creating a child theme (contact the Commons Help if you elect to go this route).
Some drawbacks – the slider does not animate, and you have to manually advance it. Some studies suggest this is a better user experience. (If you make a child theme, here is a way to make it animate.) There is no easy way to change color scheme. If you like the black background, you are in luck – if not, polish up on your CSS skills.
Hope you have fun with this theme!
