Magisch Schön, Karlsruhe: a magician's website with its own WordPress theme

magisch-schoen.de has been online since 2004 and most recently ran on the Divi page builder (a drag-and-drop extension for WordPress). Our brief: rebuild the familiar look as a lean, bespoke WordPress theme – the same design and imagery, but with no page builder, no plugins, no third-party servers and no cookies. Every path on the site leads to an enquiry by e-mail or phone; there is no contact form, as the privacy policy itself expressly states.

We programmed the “Ernestin” theme specifically for this website. It carries over the design of the previous site – the bold orange-red panel in the header, the “Ernestin” lettering in the playful display face Henny Penny, the portrait with top hat, red braces and oversized ghost playing cards – and raises the contrast: we darkened the accent and link colours until text and background reach a ratio of 4.5:1 (the requirement for comfortably legible body text). The home page is a one-page site: the header with the buttons “Jetzt Anfragen” (enquire now) and “Erfahre mehr über mich” (find out more about me) is followed by the “Hallo Kinder!” section with the next show date, two counters, the sections “Was ich biete” (what I offer), “Anfragen” (enquiries) and “Mitgliedschaften” (memberships), the “Eindrücke” (impressions) gallery with five images and a closing call to action. Separate sub-pages exist only for the references (“Wo es schon ‚magisch Schön‘ war” – where it has already been magically Schön), the legal notice and the privacy policy; the booking terms are linked as a PDF.

Technically the site stays lean: no page builder, three stylesheets (design files for layout, fonts and the consent dialogue) and two scripts, all deferred and all served from the site's own server. The source code loads not a single plugin (add-on module) and no third-party resource: no Google Fonts, no CDN (an external delivery server), no trackers. The fonts Open Sans, Karla, Montserrat and Henny Penny sit in the theme as woff2 files (a compressed web font format) and are preloaded. The portrait in the header is flagged with high loading priority, while the remaining images load only on scrolling (lazy loading). On activation the theme sets up all pages, images, menu, logo and home page itself. There is no contact form: the buttons “Jetzt Anfragen” and “Jetzt Anrufen” (call now) open the e-mail client or dial the phone number, and the address in the body text is obscured against automated address harvesters.

The consent dialogue is part of the theme, not a plugin. Because the website sets no cookies and loads no external services, only one decision remains: the page-view count on the site's own server, which is off by default and starts only after consent. The “Datenschutz-Einstellungen” (privacy settings) dialogue offers “Alle akzeptieren” (accept all), “Nur notwendige” (necessary only) and “Einstellungen” (settings); the browser remembers the choice in localStorage (a store inside the browser that works without cookies), and it can be changed at any time via the “Cookie-Einstellungen” button in the footer. A skip link to the content (a help for keyboard and screen-reader users), labelled navigation (ARIA attributes that tell screen readers what an element does), alt text on every image and WordPress's own sitemap (a page index for search engines) are part of the basic set-up.