We built the original HIP Investor site several years ago by customizing a WordPress theme to our liking. Looked great, worked well, but it was just custom enough that we couldn’t do much from within the WP admin area for content changes. Even the nav wasn’t a WP menu, the widgets weren’t, well, widgets, and we had to put custom code into the PHP files to change an element on the sidebar.

I know that the HIP crew is hands on, active bloggers and content creators, and are also busy with events, forums, and discussions. They wanted something that they could use themselves–but also make the power of a content management system work for them. The more we discussed, the more and more clear it became that WOO Canvas was the solution.

Canvas lets you control so many settings it’s just nutty. All from within the admin area, there are font selections (color, size, even Google fonts), layout choices, SEO tools, header, footer, and sidebar widgets, even a full-blown sidebar manager (to help with conditional widget/sidebar placement). It’s all there at your logged-on fingertips. When the settings aren’t there, it’s easy to make CSS changes to the Freshcanvas child theme and voila, custom changes that won’t affect the upgrading of the framework or the Canvas theme.

Check out the new HIP on WOO.