Most of the themes created by the professional design team at WordPress.com are geared towards bloggers. Business themes make up a much smaller segment of those designed in-house. That’s why the latest Pique theme is an unusual and exciting release.
Although the theme was originally designed for coffee shops, it also works well for other small businesses like cafés, bakeries, hair salons, and shops. Pique can be instantly branded for any business by uploading a logo and a custom header.
Its unique scrolling front page is created by adding panel sections, which are actually standard pages with content and featured images. Pique includes eight optional panels, which can be assigned within the customizer. Each panel control includes a dropdown selection of pages for the panel content, a background color option, and the ability to adjust the featured image’s opacity.
Single posts have an optional sidebar and the footer also includes three widget areas. Pique supports different page designs via three unique templates: full-width, grid, and testimonials. A grid style page needs to be set as a parent page and individual items will show up if they are set as child pages. The featured image of the child page displays as an image in the grid. It’s a somewhat convoluted process that’s not terribly intuitive, but it works.
Testimonials and recent blog posts can be displayed within the panels following instructions in the theme’s documentation. All testimonial content can also be viewed via its dedicated archive page at /testimonial/.
Pique has the capacity for special formatting using icons from Font Awesome. Call-to-action buttons and panel overlay text can be added using short HTML snippets from the theme’s instructions.
Pique makes it easy for anyone to build a one-page, branded website with all the specialized content sections that you would traditionally expect from a business theme. It has not yet arrived on WordPress.org but self-hosted uses can download the theme as a zip file from its homepage on WordPress.com.
Love the typography overall and the border style around the headings