When I was still in the Director of Client Delivery role, I had the chance to oversee a really cool project that we worked on with GoDaddy. The idea was to build a theme framework that leveraged Gutenberg and GoDaddy’s recently acquired CoBlocks, ultimately producing a very flexible theme that makes it easy for anyone to spin up a site about pretty much anything. The end product was the Go by GoDaddy theme.
The design approach to this project was unique in that we were designing for a handful of different use cases, knowing they could be configured in an insane amount of ways. We ended up having to take a more component-ized approach for initial styles but still layout a wide variety of pages to really get a sense of how they could fit together.
Until recently, I never really had a chance to play with it as much as I would have liked but over the last week I have been digging in and I have been super impressed.
Site Design
The first thing I absolutely love is the flexibility in the site design options within the customizer. You can choose from a variety of styles that apply css “themes” to your entire site – fonts, layout, colors, etc. On top of that you can also choose from existing color palettes to personalize everything to your preference or personality.
Header Layout
In case you don’t work in web, the header can be a bit of a pain to play around with because it’s a global element. Making major layout changes can negatively impact some of your page templates and best case scenario you spend a decent amount of time testing global changes.
The Go Theme has several header options that allow you to adjust based on what you need. Different layouts look better with logos vs text titles or menus with dropdowns vs one-dimensional nav.
Layout Flexibility
CoBlocks has over 30 blocks to choose from, which keeps you from being limited as you write or shape your site content. I have been struggling with the core block for columns and recently found out the CoBlocks option is infinitely more flexible. For the most part, you can work about any content element in with this library without having to do anything too hacky.
This definitely isn’t an enterprise-level theme for a company with strict branding guidelines but it’s a very flexible option for small businesses, enthusiasts, and pretty much everyone else.