When home decorator Lisa Baer of Baer Home Design approached me for help updating the look of her WordPress site, I immediately thought of the new Decor theme from StudioPress. With four stately color themes and a dark damask header, it was the perfect theme to serve as a backdrop for Lisa’s beautiful work.

Decor Theme: Out of the Box

The theme is beautiful as-is. It comes with a single, double, and three column layout. In the case of the Baer Home Design site, we used a single column for the majority of the site and then switched to the three column layout for the blog.

This was important for Lisa who wanted the blog to be visually integrated with the site, but still have a bit of a standalone feel where layout was concerned.

Customizations

I created a custom home page for Baer Home Design, bringing in an image slider and three widgetized areas to give it a less “bloggy” look.

Decor Theme – Default home page w/ 3 column layout, showing recent posts.

Decor Theme – Custom home page, featuring a slider and three widget areas.

The newsletter signup box that comes with Decor is meant to work with the Genesis – e-News & Updates widget, a simple interface to connect with Feedburner. Since Lisa uses Constant Contact to keep in touch with her customers, I modified the code to interact with CC instead of Feedburner.

The bottom line on the Decor Theme

Kudos to StudioPress for some fine CSS and design work on the Decor theme. I was thrilled to have an opportunity to use it!

Check out the Baer Home Design website to see the Decor theme in action. You might even pick up some interior design tricks while you’re there!