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Philosophy

HoverCraft is a WordPress theme that makes long-term maintenance as easy as possible. After several years of working with WordPress, web hosting, and internet marketing, our team wanted something that supported commonly used design features — with minimal tinkering required.

“Make everything as simple as possible, but not simpler.”

— Albert Einstein et al

Say goodbye to bloated designs

When you think carefully about customizing WordPress layouts, you will notice something interesting: things like headers, footers, and sidebars are nearly always uniform site-wide elements, and most of the “unique” DOM elements exist in the small space in between… if at all.

We don’t know about you, but we don’t particularly enjoy playing with page builders, theme settings, and janky plugins that “hack” WordPress layouts. Instead, we just want our websites to look decent, load quickly, and function properly, for a really long time! As SEO consultants, having this conversation again and again with clients was exhausting… was there no simpler approach to this? HoverCraft is both a philosophical and technical return to the roots of WordPress and web design, that aims to demonstrate a solution to these problems.

Headers, widgets, and menus

In real estate, they often say that “kitchens and bathrooms are what sell houses”. The goal of HoverCraft is to identity exactly what DOM elements that most web designers need to add to a new website to not only satisfy their clients and general aesthetics, but also the technical aspects of a modern, savvy WordPress site.

After consulting hundreds of clients of all sizes over the years, we know that above-the-fold is what matters most, regardless of the device used… and that, as mobile continues to cannibalize desktop traffic, super fancy DOM elements are becoming pointless. Therefore, our WordPress theme focuses heavily on providing several great-looking header layouts to choose from using the built-in page templates function of WordPress Core, along with several key menu and widget locations that have been very consciously chosen. If you’re a minimalist who hates most WordPress themes because of bloat that’s forced into them, you will love HoverCraft, because it doesn’t try to bundle scripts or functions that belong in plugins. HoverCraft is also 100% free and open source on GitHub, so there’s no annoying API keys, user logins, or premium upgrades you have to worry about, either. We hope you like our approach, and please don’t be shy about offering feedback.