Why FlexBlock & FlexThemes will make your life easier | Interview with Trevor Kennedy

Let’s agree on this one thing: boundaries are our nemesis and honestly, if we could, we’d vote all the limits off this planet. But seriously, to creative people limits are unacceptable. They hinder development and repel artistic expression. Thus, building a tool that would erase all the creative limits was a task of global importance for our team, (just like bringing the Ring to Mordor was for Frodo, if you will!)

Working on FlexBlock and putting it into action has been an essential step for us, yet, it’s been an even bigger leap for our clients. A tool that is simple to use, intuitive, capable to expand your theme’s functionality without the need to resort to a web designer/developer, and available for Free – sounds like a dream to us. Don’t you agree?

Now, we know we can get super geeky sometimes and use a confusing amount of terminology, such as FlexBlock, Flexthemes, Classic and Legacy themes… That’s why we asked one of our beloved clients, Trevor Kennedy, who worked with all of them, to share his experience with you.

If you’ve also worked with multiple themes and products of ours – we’d love to hear from you! Send us a message.

How long have you been with Flothemes?

We’ve been using Flothemes since the Como theme in November 2016.

We love how you transformed Kyoto into a completely unique design. Tell us about your experience with FlexBlock

Thanks! One of the things we feel really strong about is that building a brand around your wedding photography is actually not about the images as much as about the words. That sounds counterintuitive, but the words you use to talk about your work infuse your potential clients with certain emotions. Those words will stick with them in their hearts till the moment they see their own images. 

So, we always start our design from the text (or more accurately, the emotion and feeling first) and then let that dictate the visual direction. Since we’ve always wanted to have interesting ways to display text with our images, working with FlexBlock has been incredible. 

FlexBlock is what we’ve been dreaming about since we started working with Flothemes. I’ve had these design thoughts in my head for our website, which we couldn’t bring to life without creating them from scratch. FlexBlock not only makes it possible, it just works so intuitively. We even started blogging with FlexBlock (see example here). This look for our blog posts has been something we’ve wanted for so long. We feel like we can really control the way your eye moves between images by using this method and it becomes more impactful emotionally.

What did you enjoy the most?

There are a lot of things to love. But the two most important things are also the two things that were the hardest before we started. Creating usable mobile layouts and controlling resizing in different browser sizes. Both of those are just so wonderful in FlexBlock. Especially now, as we started using FlexBlock for our blog posts. One of the things we disliked tremendously in the popular blogging tools (Narrative and Blogstomp) is mobile (especially resizing). The desktop layout would look great, but as you resized down and eventually hit the mobile size it looked worse and worse. In FlexBlock we were able to create a mobile specific layout for the blog post and it’s beautiful.

What was most challenging?

Also mobile. Syncing text between mobile and desktop layouts is not great. But this has changed with the January update.

How do you feel about your new website (after reworking it with FlexBlock)? 

I’m absolutely in love with it. It refined what we love about our work and helped us share that in a more direct way with our potential couples.

Has it impacted your business in any way?

Absolutely! We’ve already had new leads mentioning that the design of our website was something that drew them in. For about 50% of our couples, one of the partners has worked in a creative field, so this feels really great to hear.

You launched a second website, with Lyra. How was it working with a Flextheme as compared to a Classic theme + FlexBlock? 

That’s such a great question. Our favorite thing about working with Lyra over Kyoto is the flexibility. The only way to describe the difference is that Lyra (and all the flexthemes) are POWERFUL. They are powerful and opinionated in their design, which is wonderful. But really what I’m talking about is the ability to create really compelling designs that are cohesive and easy to use. It encourages you to work on your site, because it’s just so simple to use. Some of the things we did with our Lyra theme, we tried to recreate with our Kyoto theme and it was not nearly as easy or straightforward.

Check out Trevor’s website built with Lyra.

Any advice for folks considering switching to Flothemes, or upgrading to a flextheme? 

Do it. One of the things that has always struck me about Flothemes is that they really seem to care about making us better. They get it. They understand what it means to be a working photographer and everything about their themes is designed to make your life easier. And the best part is they keep getting better at it with every new theme.

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We couldn’t have said it better ourselves – stop hesitating, do it, it’s so much worth it! FlexBlock has the potential to change your life as a website and business owner, and that’s not something we preach, but rather something our clients keep telling us. It will offer you the key to endless creative expression, thus transforming more of your ideas into reality and, subsequently making you a happier and more confident human being!

Flothemes Team,
Inspiring You.