Site Frame
Site Frame is the reusable desktop shell in Anima LT themes — the set of rails that wrap your content and give your site a clear outer edge instead of running wall-to-wall. Every Anima-based LT theme ships with a Site Frame, and the Customizer lets you pick its style, its palette, and how prominent it feels against the content.
What Site Frame is
The site frame is a visual shell that lives on the edges of the desktop layout, separate from the content inside. It gives your theme a deliberate outer border, a dedicated place to surface a secondary navigation, and a rhythm that stays consistent as visitors move between pages.
Site Frame is available on every Anima-based LT theme. It is always-on where it ships, but its appearance is driven entirely by the controls in the Customizer’s Site Frame panel — so you can make the frame prominent, quiet, or almost invisible depending on the site.
Site Frame styles
Site Frame is a system, not a single look. Each style is a distinct visual language for the shell, and the theme exposes the ones it supports so you can pick the one that fits your site. More styles will be added over time; each new style appears as a selectable option alongside the existing ones, with its own shape and rhythm.
Editorial
Editorial is the first Site Frame style. It presents as a set of narrow framed rails along the edges of the desktop viewport, in the spirit of a classic editorial layout where the page content sits inside a clearly drawn border.
The rails carry the site’s secondary navigation (assigned through the Site Frame menu location described below), pick up their color treatment from the Palette and Color Grade controls, and adapt to dark mode alongside the rest of the site. Because the rails are part of the shell rather than the content, they stay in place as visitors scroll and as they move between pages.
The Site Frame menu location
Site Frame has its own dedicated menu location called Site Frame. Any menu you assign there is rendered inside the frame instead of in the main header, which lets you keep short-form, supporting navigation separate from the primary menu.
- In the WordPress admin, go to Appearance → Menus.
- Select or create the menu you want in the site frame.
- Under Menu Settings, tick the Site Frame display location and save.
Items in the Site Frame menu are auto-styled to suit the shell, so you don’t need to pick icons or adjust labels by hand:
- Single-character items: a label that is just one character is rendered as a monogram letter, which works well as a compact brand mark inside the rail.
- Social profile links: URLs that point to a known social network are detected and rendered as the matching social icon.
- Regular links: normal menu items are rendered as discreet nav items that sit quietly inside the frame.
Palette and Color Grade
Two Customizer controls tune how the site frame looks across every style. Both live in the Site Frame panel and preview live as you adjust them.
- Palette: picks which of your site’s overall palettes the frame draws from. Match it to your content palette for a unified look, or point it at a contrasting palette to make the frame stand apart from the page.
- Color Grade: sets how intense the frame’s color treatment is relative to the content. You get 12 tonal grades plus an Accent option, which lets you go from an almost-invisible frame to a deliberately prominent one.
Both controls are dark-mode aware, so the grade you choose keeps its intended feel when visitors switch modes. To adjust them, open Appearance → Customize → Site Frame.
Site Frame on mobile
The site frame is a desktop-layout element and does not render its own rails on mobile. Instead, any items you have assigned to the Site Frame menu are appended to the bottom of the main mobile menu, so mobile visitors see a single, combined list of navigation rather than two separate menus stacked on top of each other.
You don’t need to duplicate links between the primary menu and the Site Frame menu to reach mobile visitors — the merge happens automatically.