Genesis is the industry standard of WordPress theme frameworks and the Altitude child theme is proving to be one of the most popular Genesis child themes around. Just see the showcase of stunning sites built on Altitude here.
Like all current Genesis child themes, Altitude is fully mobile responsive, as well as being easy to customise.
It also sports a parallax design. That means full width layout with a long scrolling homepage and where the background moves at a slower rate to the foreground. This creates a 3D effect as you scroll down the website homepage. This gives a nice and subtle element of depth and perspective.
Parallax designs are becoming increasingly popular and so more WordPress and Genesis theme designers are releasing them in order to cater to this extra demand.
Parallax websites have a number of benefits for WordPress users, but also some downsides…
Advantages
- They look cool, which leads to better visitor engagement
- This can lead to longer visitor time on the website
- The overall website traffic can increase as a result
Disadvantages
- Heavier coding is required for the effect, which can slow down page loading times. Using suitably web friendly images and a good caching plugin helps to minimise this problem.
- Some people just don’t like long-scrolling pages. However, a parallax homepage should ideally present an overview of the website as teasing snippets. Presenting too much of the site’s content just on the homepage is overkill.
You can learn how to build a WordPress website on our basic course, then learn how to apply and configure your site with the Altitude theme on our Advanced WordPress course.
