Bonjour!
My name is Valentin. I’m a French trombone player and fire artist living in Austin, Texas. Most of my time is spent travelling around for my concert in Germany, Denmark, Spain, Italy, Finland and other countries.
You guys may be wondering what a musician would have anything to do with CMS, WordPress theme and those IT stuff. I can just say blogging and web development have become my second interest and sideline job as well.
Valentin Guerin
This blog post by Valentin Guerin is a part of our WordPress Customer Spotlight section, where DesignWall users come and share their beautiful projects as well as their valuable development experience.
One of my projects is the nutritionniste-a-paris.fr blog – a WordPress site on nutrition tips using the timeline WordPress theme – DW Timeline. And I would love to share with you my experience with this elegant theme later on.
What brought me to web development
When going on tour, I’ve met a lot of musicians and ensemble who want to have a small website for their business. As I have had about a year of learning web development at an IT academy earlier, I decided to give it a try and end up making websites for many musicians up until now.
I even developed my personal website valentin-guerin.fr, from scratch without a support of any CMS. But still, I tend to work with WordPress most of the time, as many customers want to have a blog together with their website.
Beside that, I’m currently working on an app for managing orchestras and have now taken over the development of ConcertPress – an event management WordPress plugin tailored for classical musicians as well.
About my Nutritionniste à Paris blog
I’m the one who pay much attention to nutrition and healthy living. It’s easy to see that our current modern lifestyle spares us little time for exercising and employing a nutritious regimen.
That’s why the idea for nutritionniste-a-paris.fr came up to me as an online nutritionist where people can turn to for health consultancy. It definitely can not fully replace a real nutritionist, yet would be quite useful for a quick advice and research.
The first timeline WordPress theme I saw, I chose it
That must be the right words to talk about DW Timeline. At first I google “best free wordpress theme”, plus the current month and year during the theme searching process. And I stumbled upon DW Timeline theme after a few clicks.
It was the first timeline theme I came through, yet I decided to look no further and settle on this layout right away. I pretty love the timeline layout with infinite scrolling where condensed informations can be displayed in the most elegant way. The theme is modern, well-structured and quite fast as well.
The development process worked out without bumps
Though I’ve been making websites for a while now, I’m still an amateur developer lacking a lot in experience. The making of nutritionniste-a-paris.fr took me quite some time to finish. But I’m glad that everything worked out just fine and I didn’t need to contact anyone for support. Slow yet smoothly and stable. Yes, those are the right words.
To make the theme DW Timeline suit my need, I added 4 widgets under the header and make the menu sticky for better navigation. I also included social sharing and Facebook like box in every single post. Even if I did change quite a bit, I’ve always tried to keep it as simple as possible.
Customization and production is not something you do in one day. The hardest part is to know what you want, then it’s all about coding it. I’m not the best person to give development advice to people since it’s just a hobby for me. But the main point is to like what you’re doing, and keep it simple. If you don’t like what you’re doing, it means there is something wrong and you should start again.
By the way, this has nothing to do with web development, but if you want to see me playing on my trombone, throwing 8 metres of fire, go and check out my YouTube video: Fantastic Polka on the Pyro-Trombone.
