Tweaking DW Minion WordPress blog theme with Karina Kudryavtseva

Hi everyone,

My name is Karina Kudryavtseva. I come from one of the most beautiful places on earth called Vancouver Island in Canada.

For now, I am working mainly as a web designer for a design agency. Beside that, I also have several personal projects to tend to. One of them is Inspicafe – an inspiration online cafe for creative professionals, entrepreneurs, freelancers, truth seekers and cat lovers. The site was created using DW Minion – a free WordPress theme for Blog.

Karina Kudryavtseva

This blog post by Karina Kudryavtseva 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.

I’m glad to have today’s chance to write a few words about my project and this minimal yet excellent WordPress blog theme.

How my brainchild – Inspicafe.com was initiated  

Spare me if I’m going to ramble too much on this part, yet I strongly believe that the story behind Inspicafe’s birth really deserves a proper explanation.

There was a time in my life when I was at a job that I didn’t enjoy (it was far from web design!) and I felt quite uninspired and lost as to what I wanted to do and how I was going to make money without feeling like I was just wasting my time day after day.

I was looking for advice but couldn’t find it. Many people around me did not particularly enjoy their jobs either but rarely gave it a thought. Money was their motivating factor, and dreading Mondays was a subject of jokes, not something to be concerned about.

At a certain point the feeling of everything being not the way I wanted became too strong, and I needed to take action. I completely changed my career direction, quit my job, went back to college and started studying graphic design.

Now, several years later, I am very happy with what I do and what my life is like. Pursuing something I was passionate about has changed my life so completely and in so many ways that I feel very inspired about supporting other people that might be on the same journey.

And that is why I started Inspicafe, a blog with a collection of advice and inspiration for people who are trying to change their life for the better, particularly their career life.

Minion served beyond my expectation

It took me quite some time to look for a suitable WordPress theme for Inspicafe as I was quite demanding regarding both features and design of the opted theme.

Not only should it be a simple blogging theme for easy management but also have to include all the features I needed and offer various customization options. And what’s more? A looker from the design point of view would be a perfect plus as my blog is about inspiration after all. It needs to be pleasing to the eyes, you know.

DW Minion caught my eyes in its original look and quite interesting features. It seemed like an elegant yet light-weight theme, very nice-looking but not overpowering at the same time. It got me feeling that this theme would lend a good frame for my content. And it turned out, DW Minion did not bum me out at all with the completion of my project – Inspicafe – a product of more than just a plain blog.

Behind the site’s development

It took me only a few days to get it to where the site is now, mostly because I like trying out various looks and layouts. The theme DW Minion was great to work with – flexible, very intuitive without any bugs or issues. I could freely customize it to my liking and I am pretty happy with how Inspicafe turned out in the end!

I especially loved the option for having sidebars on both the left and right hand sides of the screen along with the various post types available (Standard, Video, Quote, etc). It makes both layout and content more diversified and interesting with less work required from the developer. Nice feature!

If I had found this theme earlier it would surely have saved me a lot of time and effort. I highly recommend DW Minion to other users who want both a convenience of use and an impressive end result.

Thanks DesignWall team for creating DW Minion! Keep up the great job, I will definitely be back for more of your WordPress themes for my future projects.

Contact me or just comment below if you have any question regarding the creation of my Inspicafe blog or how I managed the tweak of DW Minion theme.