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[AudreaRobbins]

I need advice from those of you that are experienced in X and in web design…To explain, this is going to be longer than I want but I am going to cut to the chase as much as possible…
A little background first… My family owns a fee only financial advisory firm and even though I’m a financial planner, I tend to enjoy doing the marketing more, so over the years I have become our Marketing Director full time. With that, I took over our website as well because we became so frustrated with hiring firm after firm that never delivered what we requested and paid for. After Joomla and a 3rd party software, I created my own using a template I purchased and WordPress. I did very well with it until we decided that it was a bit much for me because we were about to embark on a commercial project that was going to take all my time. I purchased X and played around with it but again we we decided in the long run that we needed a company so we hired a small firm. We also felt that if we were spending that much on TV commercials, we needed someone to give us demographic info of where the traffic was coming from more than what I had set up with just google analytics. Well, I explained to the new people how I was adamant that I didn’t want to leave WordPress but we were talked into Drupal anyway. HATE DRUPAL! Huge mistake and after a year of a new website that “looks somewhat pretty superficially”, I’m back to where I began. Many things still don’t work, they didn’t deliver on some promises and it took them a year to get what I do have. I still cannot do half of what I did in WordPress and they can’t seem to fix things like giving me a simple way to upload vidoes correctly. Heck, videos won’t even show correctly under media. Neither do my images when posted (Christmas cards for example). I could go on and on. Everything requested takes months to receive and we are just done trying. So I’m back to doing it myself again and using X. By the way, our website is http://www.moneymanagementservice.com is you want to take a look at it. We like the colors and design (for the most part) because we came up with it… But the media is so screwed up and unfixable by them apparently.

SO TO MY QUESTION – by looking at our site as it is now – which X template or demo template would you begin with if you were me???????? I just don’t have alot of time to sift through it all again and research which template, etc. So if you were me and you wanted the site I have now to look somewhat similar (a few changes) which template would you choose to begin with and why? Because I keep changing them out and playing around and they don’t seem to be what I want. I’m confused on which to begin with I guess. And any other suggestions would be helpful to get going again… Is there a checklist somewhere of what to start with setting up a new site? It’s been a few years since I did this so I’ve forgotten a few things. I’m going to just build this on another domain (test site) and convert it too. I won’t be able to bring anything over either. I will have to copy/paste everything which is frustrating. Because I have no clue how to bring drupal to wordpress. I did a search and came up with nothing.

Any help from those of you much more experience than I am is much appreciated!!!!!!!! Thanks so much!

[b-lynk]

I’m not sure this is going to be what you are looking for in an answer – but I would just rebuild each page from scratch.

Your entire site (currently) uses the same Header / Footer on each page – so I would start by dialing those sections in with the appropriate content / widgets / images…

Once you have Header / Footer built – just create a new page, and use the “Blank Container – Header,Footer page layout” – this way – all that’s left for you to build / customize is the content on each page…which can be recreated fairly quickly with X-Theme and Cornerstone…

Cornerstone will help you to create the sections / columns / rows that you need in order to build the correct layout for each page – you can read more about that here: https://community.theme.co/kb/cornerstone-interface-layout/

Once you have the blocks/sections for your page setup – you can just drag/drop individual Cornerstone elements into each section to recreate what’s been done on each of your Drupal pages. You can read more about the cornerstone elements here: https://community.theme.co/kb/cornerstone-interface-elements/

Lastly – if there’s something you can’t seem to find in the CS elements list, you can check the shortcodes that are available to use from here: https://community.theme.co/kb/

—

I know that sounds like a lot….but honestly – I think you’ll have more cleanup than it’s worth to start with a complete dummy-data site, and it’s actually very easy to get into CS and start figuring out how to build individual pages…

NOTE: take a deep breath, let go of all the fear that you don’t know this & jump in head first – you can’t break it (most-likely) 🙂

ALSO – this short video on XTheme / Cornerstone will walk you through just about everything I’ve outlined above. You got this!

[Joao]

Hi There,

First of all I would like to say will be a pleasure to guide you during the setup of your website and end up your frustrations once for all, it sounds like you have been having a hard time.

I also totally agree with b-lynk, I think starting from scratch is the way to go.

I personally think the Wedding Demo could be a good starting point.

If you are not familiar with X please I would recommend you watching some videos of our knowledge base.

I always recommend starting with Customizer after that you could watch the Cornerstone series and the video suggested above, which should be good based on the good comments of b-lynk.

Once you have understood the basics, and have a good idea of what you want to achieve, feel free to reach us so we can guide you every time you have a question, just try to be clear and if possible send references so we can be able to help you the fast as possible.

Hope it helps

Joao

[AudreaRobbins]

Thanks. That helps. I guess that we have just been through alot and I’m beat down. I researched X alot a year ago. But… it’s been a year ago and the theme has upgraded alot since then… So I guess I just didn’t know if I even wanted to delve into it again. It sounds as if that may be the way to go. I just want it to look good and not waste my time. I’m not a newbie and my other site looked fine… It was more of a “let me let this go so that I can do bigger things” kind of thing… But now we realize that I need to be back in charge of it. Sigh… This I knew but I had to prove it to others I guess. Thanks for the video and I will re-access myself with X again and get going. Thanks. And if anyone has any other ideas, feel free to post. I’m always open to opinions. Thanks again guys!

[Joao]

Hi Audrea,

Just start your website and if you face any issues just contact us and we will provide you guidance or opinions.

Good luck!

Joao

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