Hello good folks of the Ghost community. It’s been a while!
I am launching a consulting and training business in January, and I need a website. I have used Ghost previously and love the UI, but can’t find a theme with home options that feel right for what I want to achieve. It would be great to hear from publishers and theme devs on your experience of customising existing themes, building from scratch or building from a design in Webflow.
The functionality I am looking for includes:
- Landing homepage, with strong brand identity, promotes podcast, upcoming training events to enrol into and recent blog posts.
- Podcast-focussed page and episode posts with a consistent page layout design. I assume this could be a custom podcast overview template, and then a collection of ‘podcast’ posts that use a particular post style.
- Blog with the usual categories etc, but also has Case Studies, Portfolio and Customer Stories (custom post styles and collections?)
- A page to promote courses and enrolments, and an individual page for each course with a custom layout because it needs to include course metadata and payment gateway.
- Membership will come later, and members will have a resource library and private newsletter.
- Any other resources etc can be on Gumroad.
I have found some Webflow templates that I like, and their CMS would be OK to work with, but it looks like I’d probably write elsewhere and copy paste in. I think with Ghost I’d draft elsewhere and do final writing within Ghost itself, and have a editing / revision workflow. I also much prefer the clean UI and writing space in Ghost. I know that its possible to design in Webflow and output as Ghost theme but I’m not sure how to do this (have tried in the past and the learning curve is a bit high for my out of date coding skills). Is it possible to host in Webflow with Ghost as a headless CMS?
So my questions are:
-
Is there any out of the box themes that are set up to support the multiple blog / collections I’ve described, and might just need a custom template setup for the landing page?
-
How hard it is to design in webflow and export to a Ghost theme and/or how hard / complex is it to have Ghost as a headless CMS for webflow?
-
Has anyone built upon the free themes e.g. merging a few of the Ghost-created free themes, to create their own custom platform? Is this possible, worthwhile etc?
-
Should I go full custom design OR buy a theme and over time heavily customise it?
-
I accept too I might be on the wrong track completely and appreciate your opinions!
Thanks so much for your time and thoughts! I’ve been debating posting this but think it’s time I get the collective opinion from folks much more across all of this than I am at the moment :)