Warm greetings from Russia, everyone!
My name is Natalia Ivanova. In the daytime, I am a system engineer in Nizhniy Novgorod – a city 400 kilometers from Moscow that is famous for shipbuilding and car manufacturing. But after the working hours, I am in charge of The Valve Times, a magazine blog for games using responsive WordPress theme – WallPress.
Natalia Ivanova
This blog post by Natalia Ivanova 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.
The Valve Times & my love for games
As you may guess, I am quite into video games. Not only playing it but I also used to be the chief editor for one Russian gaming website devoted to Team Fortress 2. During the time I was working there, I’ve got the chance to learn truly exciting experience in this field. But everyone wants to have a project of their own, you know. So in 2013, I and some members of my previous crew decided to launch a non-commercial online magazine dedicated for games. And that’s how The Valve Times was born.
The site got its name “Valve Times” as our team love Valve games so much and we would like to create a newspaper spirit in it like “The New York Times”.
How I met responsive WordPress theme – WallPress
I decided to choose WordPress as the platform for my project since it is one of the most popular CMS out there that is easy to use. At the beginning, I’d tried a lot of WordPress themes for magazine but none of them really satisfied my needs.
After a long search for the perfect theme, I came across WallPress theme by chance. And when I explore the demo of it, it was like a “Wow, Gotcha!” moment for me. Our team liked it very much as it is not only clean and well-tuned for magazine style but also supports responsive layout so that our site’s look and feel won’t be compromised on collapsed screens.
The making of Valvetimes.com
As there are many websites about games out there, both in Russia and over the globe, so we wanted to make sure The Valve Times becomes a unique game magazine and dissimilar to the others. To emphasize the newspaper concept idea, we changed the background to some kind of paper pattern so that the online magazine would actually look like a real magazine decorated with grids and columns.
Other than bombarding readers with boring chunks of text, we pay special attention to filling our blog with lots of images and videos so that people won’t find it boring and monotonous.
As the slang name of Valve means “waffles” in Russian, we decided to make the logo branding looks like there’s a piece of waffles in it.
We’ve also changed the sidebar and header background into a darker shade so that the whole site would have a multi-layer effect. As WallPress has no place for widgets on the main page, we are considering creating a new front page for the website with more features added.
Games are changing every day, and so does our site. A year has passed since valvetimes.com was first created and a lot of news, photos and videos have been published on it. There are lots of things we’re going to do to enhance this project in both function and design. So, for anyone interested, let’s bookmark valvetimes.com and come back again in a couple of months to see our progress.
Thanks to DesignWall team for the great WordPress theme and the opportunity to participate in this WallPress showcase. Thanks Jin and the whole support staff for the great assistance also. None of our questions was left unanswered or without proper attention.
Finally, contact me via LinkedIn if you want to know more about my project and the WallPress theme from DesignWall 🙂
