NOTE: This user no longer uses the DW Focus.
Greeting from Washington, D.C!
My name is Andy Lewandowski. I am from California and currently live in Washington, D.C. I am a news junkie and love politics. One day, I thought why not combine my interests in a new and interesting way by starting my own website on politics news. And that’s where my initial idea for Citizen Workshop came from.
Andy Lewandowski
This blog post by Andy Lewandowski 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.
Read on if you want to know more about the development process of this WordPress news site. And don’t worry, there will be no long texts to suffer as I will go real brief and to the point.
The mission for Citizen Workshop
I wanted to create a news website that focuses on the essentials of government in the United States. I arrived at the idea to focus the site on the three branches of the U.S. federal government because there weren’t many places to find this information.
Most journalists in the U.S. focus on the politics – the horse race of elections, the grandstanding, the back-and-forth political attacks via the news media.
But many don’t focus on what’s actual going on in the government like what bills Congress passed, what cases the Supreme Court is hearing, what the president’s legislative agenda looks like.
With Citizen Workshop I provide news and information on government goings-on and focus less on the politics because it’s just not productive.
DW Focus – A stunning responsive WordPress news theme
I spent a lot of time searching for a suitable theme and found DW Focus through a featured article on Mashable. It ranked #10 among 20 stunning responsive WordPress theme in 2013 and I was quickly attracted to the theme’s simplicity and beautiful design. I liked the idea that I could easily customize it myself and make tweaks to the code to fit my needs.
It took me only a few weeks to customize the theme to meet the functions of my website. I found a lot of useful guide along with tips and tutorials on DesignWall website that provided good instructions for me to make customizations myself.
If there is something I couldn’t figure out how to do, I contacted DesignWall’s support right away and they would get back to me with prompt answers. Just one word, DesignWall has great support!
The site had a successful launch and continues to gain readership every day. I think both the beautiful responsive design and the great content have really attracted readers. There’s nothing to regret.
Finally, just want to share some of my experience when working on Citizen Workshop. To process a successful site development plan, you should make a list of all the things you need in a theme, and then prioritize these items. Find a theme that addresses your top needs, and make tweaks to address the smaller items. Nothing will be perfect at first go, so stay flexible.
Feel free to comment below if you want to know more about my journey with DW Focus.
Enjoy the story from Andy Lewandowski? Want to share your own story? If you have a beautiful project and want to share your story with us, simply submit your WordPress site and we will get back to you for more discussion on delivering an interesting showcase like this. Feel free to submit multiple times should you have more than one website.
