Is this site a WordPress theme or a custom design?

Hello everyone,

I've found a website and I'm curious about if this site is a WordPress theme or a custom design. I really loved the design and I'm planning to use it in one of my projects. Here's the link of it: https://get.properties/

If you have any insights or thoughts, I'd love to hear them. Also, if you know of any other similar themes or resources, you can share them with me.

Thanks for your help!

 

This is a WordPress website and is using premium theme.

 

This theme name is "LEVELUP - Responsive Creative Multipurpose WordPress Theme" and you can find many other multipurpose theme easily there. This theme is available on Themeforest.

 

Here's a useful website to know the theme on a website: https://whatwpthemeisthat.com

 

I think this is good one.

 

this is a common WP theme.
either the theme itself is sloppy or the implementation is sloppy

 

The Digital Point Forums website appears to be a custom design, not a WordPress theme. It runs on XenForo, a popular forum software.

 

Good one, what?
That site design?
Are you kidding?
That design is all sorts of awkward, crooked, and sloppy, the margins are not aligned....
...

 

Looks as if they bought a theme and didn`t understand how to use the tools available within the theme builder or page builder so they just installed the demo data and changed the content.

 

How can you call it a good WordPress theme if its design relies on third-party constructors and elements?
All these theme developers just create a simple base and then add third-party builders, elements, and plugins that stop working after each major update.

 

We have to keep things in context think of Bane and Batman in the Dark Knight Returns, for the initiated good and theme don`t belong in the same sentence generally speaking so this would not even be a conversation but when we are talking the uninitiated, there`s still a criteria even if we are saying a bad option is better than the worst option. The things that makes theme`s terrible choices for us are the very things that are appealing to people who are in the market for $60+ themes and who think that they can buy a theme, click demo import, change some photos and text and everything will work out perfectly. Generally speaking they`d probably be in more trouble with a custom build that used only 2 or 3 plugins and a lot of code and CSS because its still Wordpress and s**t still goes sideways with just about every major update and most of them won`t want to pay for managed maintenance...

 

The problem isn’t WordPress, it’s the user who doesn’t want to learn and expects everything to work with one click.
I've never had any problems with WordPress, not with free themes, not with premium ones, not with my own.
And yes, I do updates.

 

Exactly and those are the people the bloated themes are targeting. People who don`t want to learn the basics of the system and just want everything to work when they push the install demo button and also people offering design services who don`t want to or can`t build their own elements. With that said these types of themes can be useful to people who are interested in learning and the process or are just running a low cost site farm/monthly site service as they will use the elements to put together their own pages and templates as opposed to just relying on the 1 click demo install.

 

The thing is, it's not enough to just buy a theme and be done with it.
Either you need to find a specialist (and that's hard because everyone calls themselves a pro), or you need to learn it yourself...
In any case, you have to understand WordPress like an advanced user.
Even if you don’t have the time and delegate the task to someone else, you still need to understand how WordPress works.
It doesn't work only for the lazy ones, who always blame WordPress, the theme author, or claim the stars weren't aligned when the theme was installed.
Paid themes, in 90% of cases, are the same basic layout with a lot of bugs and glitches as free ones but with a bunch of third-party plugins and a page builder...
You’ll still have to work if you want your website to work correctly.

Before I created my own theme, I checked more than 200 different themes (both free and premium).
And although they all worked fine for me (because I fixed all the code), the quality of all these themes was still terrible.
The layout wasn’t clean, too many divs one inside another one and they both inside another one, no logic in the structure, often elements had different paddings and margins...
In my 10 years of working with WordPress, I haven’t seen a single theme where I didn’t have to fix something.

BTW, I'm not a WordPress specialist, especially wasn't 10 years ago, but even then I could fix and launch the site because I spent a few days learning the WordPress structure.
All people need is to spend a few hours understanding it, but they don't want to...
The only thing they want is a big red button to press and make everything professional.
But it doesn’t work this way... not in WordPress, nor in anything else.

 

That is 100% true but that`s just not the reality of the user who`s searching the market for $60 themes. We are looking at it from the standpoint of if you are going to have a site on Wordpress you should learn how to use Wordpress and that`s 1000% true but the reality is 95% of people no matter if they are intend to learn Wordpress or are looking for a theme or looking for a developer to build a site for them have no idea of what a good site is in general or more specifically for their niche or specific goal.

I get clients who come to me everyday and reference sites that look and function as if they were made in 2005. I had a client on Monday reference a $10,000 site with an $800 project budget. One last week wanted by my count 9 GSAP animation on the homepage of an e-commerce site because it looks cool on a services websites, our site and single product showcase sites he`d been browsing.

The site referenced here, is the perfect example forget if its a theme or not or if the code is elegant. We can`t expect people to get to that point if they can`t recognize the basics are off and most people in the market for a site wouldn`t be able to spot the issues.

The layout: they`ve got 1200+ listings with huge product cards on the real estate page and there`s only 3 listings per row. That`s fine if you only have 90 properties/products but for 1200+ you probably want to display 4 to 5 cards per row. The biggest issue with 1200+ listings this should have been a 75/25 two container layout with a pinned map taking up the 25 container.

Filter: As opposed to building a proper taxonomy filter they just threw a the basic Elementor filter at the top of the page and the placeholder text in the search bar should say something like "Country, City, Location" Not "search keywords"

The homepage filter: Doesn`t have price, city, country, size, bedrooms as filter options.

The hero: On a real-estate investment this area should pop. You are trying to convince someone to invest 500K+ with you. Somehow this section is boxed while the rest of the page is full-width. If they wanted the search to be the main feature, they could have easily added a pinned map with a search.

Under Hero: You don`t have to open up the consul to see that the under hero "top picks" section is not responsive and is taking 100VH for no reason on desktop.

Articles section: Also not responsive.

So we could say if they should have learned how to use Elementor and wordpress proficiently and efficiently even if they were using a template. Its very easy to go in to the advanced tab and remove the margin and padding, set position as fixed, default or absolute. Its simple to remove column and row gaps in the layout tab or add custom CSS etc but that`s not the question... If they don`t know what a good site looks like, how it should be laid out and function for their purpose then it doesn`t matter.

 

Hey, thanks for bringing this up — always interesting to see these discussions! I’d say this site definitely looks custom at first glance, but some elements do feel like they could be built on top of a flexible WordPress theme. I've actually used Glow Team for one of my own projects, and they helped me tweak a WP base into something super unique — so it can be tricky to tell. Do you think the layout or the animations give it away more? Curious what others think.

 

https://forums.digitalpoint.com/threads/tools-for-checking-the-uniqueness-of-the-text.2881995/

 

The second you see the search menu, color scheme and the layout you know its an Elementor template and once you start to click around you know its a lazy implementation of a theme.

There`s no need for the homepage to be boxed, especially given that fact that its light on light containers and there`s only one short text block... If that`s Levelup as I suspect then they butchered it.

The hover animation on the homepage slider is the only "premium" part of the template and that can be done 2 ways using Elementor free and a ton of ways using the Elementor CSS option in Elementor pro or Pro Elements (free)

#1: Elementor free add a slider from any plugin that has a hover overlay setting gradient 1st color #000000 and 100% transparent. 2nd color whatever you like 100% full. Location 100% liner if you want it to cover half the card and 180 degrees. That will get you to 99.9% the same place

#2: Create a container with a background cover. Add a child box with a color background, text, button etc set at bottom. Additional option set the overflow to hidden and then in advanced go set the transform offset to - whatever looks good for your box and text and then the hover offset to 0.

#3: If you are working with Elementor pro or are handy with CSS go to advanced add custom CSS and add the same hover settings as above just using CSS as opposed to the visual builder. Should only be two lines of code for the basic Transform/transition effect seen on this template. I can leave the basic code here if anyone is interested and wants to try it out themselves.

A real estate listing site, is about the most basic and easy to design type of site there is. The homepage doesn`t need to have a ton of info and the inner pages are already taken care of for you as they are going to be search filter, grid archives and a map. The only thing that takes a little thought is the individual listing.

Here: https://letslist.momentumwave.site/

That`s not polished up but its an hour of work and a few cups of coffee built from a blank canvas on top of the basic Hello theme and would look exactly the same with a blank custom theme or a blank theme by Underscores without touching the theme code. When that`s speed optimized, polished and responsive I`ll sell it off my main site for $15 - $19. Both of the card hover techniques I mentioned above are on the homepage at the bottom. Top one using Sky Addons slider and the bottom one using the off-set technique that can both be done with Elementor free.

For someone who needed to needed a more managed system in the case they had thousands of listings or didn`t want to bother setting up their own tax filters, they could easily replace my loops archive and tax filter/search with a plugin like Estatik which would be far easier for them to manage. You could also get around setting up and styling the taxonomy filters by using Woocommerce, and adding individual listings as products at which point there`s a ton of 3rd party filters available...

 

Forgot to add the template I posted there`s only required plugins and that`s Elementor or Pro Elements and Snippets. If this was being used to run a robust site ACF would make things more easy to manage. Shopping for a template should be done looking at the parts not the whole. This template you can easily move the horizontal scroll section to the hero, get rid of the hero video slider, move the bento under the slider. Change the product card to listings or service cards. Blue 200VH CTA under that. Change the video hero to a show 3 carousel and you`ve got a completely different site and a ton of non-plugin elements you can export as JSON to use in other builds or on different pages.

 

console is your friend if you are somewhat familiar..