Elegant Themes BusinessCard

Whoever searches your name already has a reference

Someone meets you at a meeting, gets your name from a colleague or finds your phone number on an invoice. Before writing to you, they look you up. They do not arrive to discover what you sell in general: they come with a prior idea and want to confirm it quickly.

A presentation site answers that visit, and every extra page moves it further from what it came to check. Who they are dealing with, what you do, what work you have done and how to reach you: that is enough. The hard part is resisting the urge to add sections because the theme allows them.

BusinessCard, from Elegant Themes, starts from that idea. It is a minimal one-page theme powered by jQuery, meant to bring together the information of a person or a small business in an online card, without the full tour of a corporate site.

Tabs with an icon and a short line

Content is divided into WordPress pages presented as tabs. Each one accepts two details added through custom fields:

• Icon: a field named Icon, holding the URL of an image hosted on your domain. The theme resizes and crops it, and the default size is 32 x 32 pixels. The name is case sensitive.
• Tagline: a field named Tagline, whose text appears after the page title.

That line does a good part of the work. With few tabs, a line such as "Brand design for restaurants" says more than a generic title such as Services.

The rest of the finish comes from five color schemes, the logo you set in ePanel, the theme's options panel, and a collection of shortcodes with buttons in the text editor. Page templates are chosen in the Templates dropdown, and their settings appear in the ET Page Templates Settings box.

Your portfolio fits in a normal gallery

The work section starts from a standard WordPress gallery, and BusinessCard turns it into a jQuery slider on its own. For it to fit, follow these settings:

• Set a 202 x 202 pixel thumbnail under Settings, Media before uploading the images.
• Create the gallery with two columns.
• Link the thumbnails to the image file.

Choose few images and keep only your best work.

An online card and nothing more

Its features do not include a drag-and-drop visual builder or a shop. Details are handled through custom fields, ePanel and shortcodes, so the work is more about configuration than free design.

Its approach is a single page, so a site with many sections calls for another base. If you foresee a service catalog, an active blog or several pages to rank, start with a theme built for that.

Before publishing, open the site on a phone and go through all the tabs and the slider.

Getting BusinessCard running

You need WordPress and the theme package, which is the Theme Package file, not the PSDs. The most comfortable order is this:

1. Upload the ZIP through the WordPress theme installer and activate it.
2. On a site with no content, import sampledata/sample.xml from Tools, Import, with the Import epanel settings box checked.
3. Place the logo in ePanel, under General Settings.
4. Replace the sample text and add the Icon and Tagline fields to each page.
5. Prepare the gallery with the 202 x 202 pixel thumbnail.

If your site runs in another language, the theme includes .mo and .po files in the /lang folder for translating its English text.

When a card runs out of room

If you want to design every part freely, Divi, also from Elegant Themes, combines theme and visual builder, with templates for header, footer and posts. For a presentation centered on the resume, the catalog includes Gentleman and Ikonik.

Questions about BusinessCard

How do I put an icon on each tab?

With an Icon custom field on the page and, as its value, the URL of an image hosted on your domain.

Where does each page's line appear?

After the page title, once you add the Tagline field with its text.

What size should gallery thumbnails be?

202 x 202 pixels, set in the WordPress media settings.

Can I import the sample data on a site with content?

The import is meant for a WordPress with no content, so run it on a clean installation.

Can it be translated?

Yes, with the .mo and .po files in the /lang folder.