Theme problems

Do CiviCRM forms look weird on your website?

Whether WordPress or Drupal, it's a challenge for some sites:

I've worked hard to make the whole site look just right, but anything that CiviCRM produces looks like it came from another planet.

Contribution pages, event registration forms, anything. Why can't I just have it look beautiful like the rest of my site?

Most CiviCRM sites don't have this kind of problem. Most themes work just fine with CiviCRM, and many organizations are so happy to have the functionality that they don't sweat the details when it comes to the visual design.

But if you're investing a lot of time and money into a beautiful comprehensive design, then "it works fine for most people" is no great comfort.

So what to do?

In my next email I'll offer a few tips and tricks that can make it easier.

But in more general terms: sometimes it's just hard.

CiviCRM is intended to run on wide variety of sites and CMSs. Its forms and pages have to look decent on any site, but it's almost impossible for them to look great, right out of the box, on every site.

There's just too much variety:

• Your custom site design;

• Your particular CMS theme;

• Plus all of the modules and plugins you may be running.

If you're one of the many for whom this isn't causing problems, that's wonderful.

But if you've already made a big investment in your site design and have a business case for making every bit of content look just so, it's probably worth budgeting a little extra to style the CiviCRM content to match.

Just how much extra effort will depend on your design requirements.

All the best,
A.