Sidespied is an elegant portfolio theme geared to showcasing creativity. Whether you’re a painter, sculptor, photographer, videomaker, or want to shine a spotlight on another type of original work, Sidespied puts your projects center-stage.

Based on Espied, Sidespied places the menu toggle button and side panel along the left part of the screen, and shows off larger featured images on the portfolio page.

If a highly visual WordPress theme for photographers is what you need, Sidespied delivers. It’s the kind of website template that will have clients and customers asking who you hired to design your site. They’ll be even more impressed when they learn you did it yourself with WordPress.com.

This free WordPress theme features streamlined side navigation that leaves more room for what really matters … your original photography, artwork, and the unique approach and experience you bring to it. Allow visitors to explore a website that showcases how you use your camera to tell a one-of-a-king story. Choose Sidespied and start building your photography website today.

Portfolio

Sidespied uses the Portfolio feature, which lets you lay out and display portfolio projects in a variety of unique ways. Learn how to take full advantage of Portfolios.

Large featured images really shine in Sidespied’s portfolios, so try to include featured images at least 1280px wide so they display at full width on wider screens.

Featured Images

Featured Images are key to Sidespied’s look-and-feel. They are displayed in multiple places, including archive pages, the portfolio page template, and when using portfolio shortcodes.

Portfolio Shortcodes

The [portfolio] shortcode can be used to display portfolio projects on any post or page. Learn how to use the portfolio shortcode.

Portfolio Page Template

The portfolio page template displays your portfolio projects. You can choose to make it your front page, or keep it as a separate page inside your site.

When you first activate Sidespied, your posts will be displayed in a traditional blog format. If you’d like to use the portfolio page template as your site’s front page – like the demo – just follow these steps:

1. Create or edit a page, and assign it to the Portfolio Page Template from the Page Attributes module.
2. Go to Customize → Static Front Page and set “Front page displays” to “A static page”.
3. Select the page you just assigned the Portfolio Page Template to as “Front page” and set another page as the “Posts page” to display your blog posts.

By default, your page title and any content you may have added will be displayed. You can opt to hide them by going to Customize → Portfolio and checking “Hide title and content on Portfolio Page Template.”

Where is the portfolio archive page?

Along with the Portfolio Page Template, projects appear on portfolio archive pages.

For example, if your URL is:

Let’s say you have a WordPress.com site at:
https://sidespieddemo.wordpress.com/

The URL of the Portfolio archive page will be:
https://sidespieddemo.wordpress.com/portfolio/

If you’d like to add the portfolio archive page to your a Custom Menu, create a custom link using the portfolio archive URL.

You can customize the portfolio archive page by changing the title, adding some content, and uploading a featured image. To do so, go to Customize → Portfolio.

Social Links

Sidespied lets you to easily link up your social media profiles, like Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter.

Set up a social links menu

1. Create a new Custom Menu, and assign it to the Social Links Menu location.
2. Add links to each of your social services using the Links panel.
3. Icons for your social links will automatically appear if it’s available.

Available icons

Linking to any of the following sites will automatically display its icon in your menu.

• CodePen
• Digg
• Dribbble
• Dropbox
• Facebook
• Flickr
• GitHub
• Google+
• Instagram
• LinkedIn
• Email (mailto: links)

• Pinterest
• Pocket
• Polldaddy
• Reddit
• RSS Feed (urls with /feed/)
• StumbleUpon
• Tumblr
• Twitter
• Vimeo
• WordPress
• YouTube

It’s just as easy as that, simply add the URL for the service you’d like to include and this theme does the rest!

Widgets

Sidespied’s widget area can be toggled open and closed from the left-hand side panel. The site menu and social links menu are also tucked away in this spot.

As a Blog Theme

Sidespied also works well as a blog theme. It’s easy to add an elegant pull quote for wider screens. Just add the alignleft or alignright class to a blockquote and the quote will subtly offset into the left or right margin.

Sidespied supports Post Formats including aside, image, video, quote, link, and gallery.

Customize Further

Customize Sidespied with a full-width Custom Header Image or Custom Background, or choose from one of four color palettes.