Setup Longevity

Welcome to the setup tutorials for the free WordPress theme named Longevity. Please note that any support you may need while setting up this theme is available to you by going to the theme’s download page at wordpress.org and click on the “View Support Forum” button.

Create a Social Networking Menu

We are going to create a social networking menu like we see in the live demo site.

Change Theme Colours

Longevity gives you 5 9preset colour choices (Longevity Pro offers 15 colours) that you can use. I normally don’t do preset colours, but because this theme uses a special curved graphic on the front of the site, we need to have this available for each colour option, otherwise you would have to manually create a new curved banner graphic. So I did this for you with the following colour selections:

An Introduction to Longevity

Longevity is a responsive multipurpose theme boasting a minimalist design concept while a unique curved graphic helps showcase your images on every page. Easy to configure and customize, Longevity gives you several options built into the WordPress Customizer for live previews as you make your changes.

Enable the top bar search next to the social icons

This is a newer feature added to Longevity version 1.2.8 and gives you the option to enable a website search field at the very top of the page, next to the social icons. By default, this feature is disabled.

How to create a front page like the live demo

This tutorial is going to be a bit involved, but it’ll help you to create a front page just like the live demo site and the screenshot that is associated with Longevity.

Choose your banner curved graphic

One of the latest additions to Longevity (starting from version 1.1.6) is the ability to select what size of a curved graphic you want to use for your banners. By default, the front page will use the larger one while inner pages will use the smaller graphic. Please note that when there is nothing published to the Banner sidebar, the small curve will show.

Disable the Preloader screen when the page loads

In the event a browser takes a little more time to load a page, you don’t want your visitors to sit there looking at a blank white screen wondering, is it loading? Longevity includes a preloader that shows before any page is loaded, which looks like this, although it’s animated:

Animation Effects for your web pages

An ongoing trend with many themes nowadays is to incorporate animation to a website, such as page elements that bounce, fly in or out, drop in, etc. Although Longevity does not require this feature, it’s more of a personal choice should you want to add some fancy special effects. To give you an example, check out the front page of the live demo:

Choose a boxed style page layout for your site

Longevity gives you the option to change the width of your website (pages) with four (4) choices. By default, your web page will be full width, or 100% the width of your browser window.

Choose your full post (single) layout style

With the choosing of your Blog Style, you can also change the full post (single) view/layout, you have 3 options: