Down the WordPress Rabbit Hole!

bythelungdoc

3.2K followers

4 years ago

One of the first decisions a Wealthy Affiliate must make is to pick out a WordPress theme.

This is an important decision because it will determine the appearance of your site, how easy it will be to work with, what plug-ins you may need, how quickly it will load, where to put ads, menu structure, just a whole slew of commitments.

But which one should you pick?

Even though I have some experience with WordPress before, it was not as a blogging site.

There are several approaches to getting a new theme here at WA depending on how much control over the appearance of your site you want to have.

Free WordPress Theme

The cheapest solution is to get a free WordPress theme. This is an attractive first choice because it is less of a commitment than purchasing a premium theme. Why purchase a theme if you can get one for free, right!

I quickly stumbled into my first rabbit hole – which free WordPress theme?

All free themes are not created equal! Some have significant functionality while others – well, not so much.

The sad truth is that many themes out there have very limited functionality and just do not have an engaging interface. Free theme developers hope you will buy their premium version and limit the functionality of their free version.

Free themes also come with little – if any – documentation.

Some of the more popular free themes have YouTube videos on how to set them up (such as Astra and OceanWP) while most don’t.

I of course picked a theme that looked good but turned out to have little functionality with little ability to modify, and minimal documentation.

So – after a few weeks of struggle I changed to another free theme, and that was a disaster. Not as easy as you might think because the structure of one theme might not blend well with another theme.

If a free theme has minimal documentation and difficult to work with, then maybe a premium (read “expensive”) theme might be better.

Move on to Door Number Two!

Premium WordPress Theme

If you can put out a little hard cash, you can get a beautiful premium theme – or so the story goes.

Premium themes are updated regularly to keep them functioning well with new WordPress versions, have the latest plugins, and have premium features not found on free themes.

This extra functionality means there are more things to mess up as I quickly found out.

But there is more documentation with a premium theme, right?

Maybe; but often the documentation is not really helpful in putting together a functional theme, changing the colors, the right typography, pagination, blog page – the multitude of things that have to be crafted to make a theme look good.

Down another rabbit hole as I tried to make the theme look like the demonstration models.

It is kind of like when you are renting an apartment and they show you a beautiful furnished model; then you sign a lease and find your place is not at all like the model. Let down.

Then I found out that many of the premium themes are featured on YouTube.

If you can get through the ads, ignore various sales pitches, and actually follow the instructions you might be able to put together something nice.

Or maybe not.

So you work for a few hours with a premium theme, get something nice, but then run into a few problems – actually big problems.

Like where do you put the ads for an affiliate program, suppose you want another widget in the footer – how do you do that? What if your theme does not have a widget in the footer – can you put one there. Usually not.

It’s not in the documentation so send an e-mail to the theme provider.

No response. So you are stuck.

OK, ever fear – there is another rabbit hole to try; how about a theme template!

On to theme builders – they have ads all over YouTube making it look so simple.

They show beautiful Web Sites which they say can be made with these new theme builders in

Theme Builders

There are several theme builders out there which are advertised heavily especially on YouTube (where we just were trying to figure out how to use our newly purchased premium theme).

Wow – what a great idea! They look so easy to use.

OK, not quite so easy to use. Back to documentation which really does not help much, and then back to YouTube.

You quickly find YouTube videos showing you how to put a theme together using these builders.

And some of these theme builders interface with premium WordPress themes (is this good or just leading to more confusion – don’t know yet).

But these themes have little in the way of a truly dynamic interface. Maybe you can figure it out; maybe not. It is even hard to figure out what these theme builders can do before you make a cash and time commitment.

And suppose you want to add some special CSS effects; it can be done but you have to know CSS and find the right classes and IDs for what you want to modify.

Learning CSS well enough to modify a Website means you have to go down yet another rabbit hold.

There’s one more option.

Develop Your Own Theme – from Scratch

While you were on YouTube trying to figure out how to make your premium theme work, you notice several videos on how to put your theme together – from scratch.

And from scratch, I mean a clean slate; nothing. No theme builder, no premium theme starter – nothing. A blank page.

This is a deep rabbit hole! So let’s down down!

So I started to learn the necessary code, particularly CSS, HTML, PHP, and JavaScript / JQuery. Then there are the frameworks which help you do make looking site especially Bootstrap 4.

That’s a lot to learn. You can get this training on various places throughout the Web. These can be long courses – like 50 - 100 hours.

I felt like I was back in medical school.

And like any new skill, I had to practice, practice, and practice. No worthwhile skill is easy to learn.

But I discovered one thing.

You still have to figure out the WordPress style you want.

Probably the best way to do that is to take a trip down internet lane until you find a site you like, and then just go at it.

It will take a bit of fumbling, but you can really make good functional site.

In fact, with code you can copy just about any site.

What I Found

What I found out is you can’t just read a book, or passively watch a few videos of somebody building a site from scratch; you actually have to build a site yourself.

It is like being an intern again – or an apprentice.

You then store the snippets of code so that a future site can be manufactured in a modular fashion a lot quicker.

Once you have built one site, the rest can come much easier.

Then you learn more and more and can introduce more functionality.

That means a snippet for the header, one for the footer, one for the home page, one for the blog listing page, etc. Then you make CSS gradients, animation effects, and ways to interact with the reader to keep them on your page.

Then you need to have both written documentation and YouTube documentation as to how to put sites together.

That’s a lot to learn.

I am going to try to share some of this knowledge here – that’s my goal.

Then go online with YouTube videos and instructional material while advertising WA as a way to use these newly learned skills.

Does that seem like a good fit – I hope so.

If you are learning the skill of making WordPress themes you might as well monetize your site.

Wish me luck!