I have a website which is quite old and complex, say 15+ years.
It is for an online multiplayer game which is even older, say 30+ years.
Now I want to migrate the page to Jekyll to ease things like mobile layout, a11y, etc.
We want to invite new players, also we find many blind people interested in playing.
Most themes I have found seem rather picture-based. We have few of those.
Most seem to help a blog style with lots news articles with a picture each. That’s not very fitting either.
Our page has come a long way and has a multitude of different types of contents.
There are tutorials and help files, descriptions of quests, classes and regions, instructions for clients to play in browser or for download, lists of maps, pictures from recent parties, videos, forums, etc. Etc.
We currently have a brief menu at top. Depending on choice, the secondary menu on left will change contents. Sometimes the secondary menu will change content even more, if you click a link to a more detailed page complex. It’s not very obvious unfortunately.
Now these are only some items and issues there.
I have been scrolling through jekyll theme collections for some hours during recent months already but I don’t find this has found much success at all.
I would not mind paying some cash for a nice fitting theme but I have a hard time even finding some half interesting ones to consider.
Please kindly suggest how to continue.
I did not want to build a new theme from scratch, so I don’t have to reinvent the wheels more badly.
I am okay with restructuring the layout and menu if it makes more sense afterwards.
I do not want to rewrite or add many new texts or pictures just for sake of migrating to a new theme.
Thanks in advance! Thanks for taking your time to read.
so you have a complicated site and want to plop in a theme that is going to make you happy and be done with it… my guess is that is going to be difficult given what you have said.
If I were you I would have someone create what you want with some pointers based on your current site and the things you think are important, but don’t be too detailed/picky about the look of it, more about the function of it and being usable by blind people etc.
I would NOT make an actual jekyll theme as they are ruby things that are sort of hidden. I would just have someone do regular CSS/SASS in with the other site files so it is easier to manage.
I’ve seen a few people on here looking for freelance work. I’d look on Fivr or another freelance site for someone experienced with jekyll.
I would also say don’t limit yourself to looking at jekyll themes - I once found a theme I liked that had nothing to do with jekyll, paid $10 or whatever it was and then stripped out the css that made it look cool and made that into my own css theme. It wasn’t all that hard, a competent freelancer that understands jekyll should be able to do that without much trouble. So you could go find a theme on themeforest or whatever and then ask a freelancer to convert that into a jekyll site.
While I don’t have your experience @rdyar, I very much agree not using a (gem-based) theme, because so much is hidden. I’ve recently built 2 sites with the full minimal mistakes theme, but it took very long for me to find where I could twiddle it to my liking. One thing for (good) themes though: responsiveness is built in, and I understand that’s part of the goal here.
BTW: as a German speaker, I briefly perused the “MorgenGrauen” site: Wow, what a wealth of material! Built with love, obviously. That will be a bundle to convert… One good thing about Jekyll might come into play: you can just “put the site into Jekyll”, and then slowly modernise piece by piece. That’s how I did it years ago.
The question is all about writing a theme from scratch but based on one of the popular HTML frameworks (Bootstrap or Foundation), to ensure certain maintainability;
The layout must be restructured if you want a responsive website, especially for small (smartphone) or medium-sized screens, the side menu isn’t the best thing to keep always visible, especially for the former;
Texts are always ok, the pictures and other graphic elements can be reused, and maybe some Javascript gallery library can be introduced to improve the presentation.
It makes no sense to alter an existing theme to make it responsive from scratch, it is always easier to adapt a responsive HTML framework to your custom theme, after all, they exist for a reason.
If you are going to buy a new theme, for longevity reasons, be sure that it’s based on one of the aforementioned frameworks, they get regular updates, and when they upgrade their versions also the migration guides are provided.
So if you don’t get updates from your vendor you have at least a community that can help you, also further customizations would be easier to approach.
@Leris I am a freelance developer working in Jekyll and Hugo static site development for 7+ years.
I can migrate your website to Jekyll with required a11y, responsiveness, SEO features.
I also excel in creating multilingual Jekyll websites so you can also enable different languages on the website.
The website does have a lot of data. I will enable other required Jekyll integrations to make site management easy for you.
I can provide a proposal with detailed workflow as per your requirement.
Let us connect over chat to discuss more about the project.
You can connect using any of the following methods :