Hi and welcome to another edition to Shawn's Tutorials.

In today's tutorial I want to talk about WordPress themes.

  • How to choose one
  • how to change one
  • Support
  • free vs paid
  • responsive themes

Lets start with what you should be looking for in a theme.

The first thing I look for in a theme is a clean uncluttered look that breathes. People like simple when they are serious about looking for something and if your theme is all cluttered up with ads or gadgets or has a bunch of flash on it or it is in any way work to navigate or figure out you have lost the visitor.

Simple is the way to go.

Next thing I look for is if the theme is responsive. With all of today's gadgets for viewing websites, from phones to tablets and such you need a responsive theme to be able to have your site show up in all the different viewers.

<HINT> It is easy to test your theme to find out if it is responsive.

To test your theme simply reduce your browser window and grab a side of it and shrink it down.

When you shrink it down the theme should shrink with the window and you can then scroll the who site in the shrunken mode.


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Carbli Premium
This should be mentioned when we are just starting to choose our theme. I've found that my theme does not show all the pages on mobile devices. There is a little arrow that the viewer has to click on to open the rest of the pages. If that person doesn't know this or catch this I have lost a visitor. Just now starting to look for a new theme and it is a huge waste of time since it took me so long to choose a theme in the first place. Thanks for the info though.
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Shawn Martin Premium
@Carbli
That is why you test the theme with the shrink method shown in the tutorial and be very careful the theme does what you want it to do. :)
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azgorilla Premium
Nice information. Originally when going through the WA videos with Kyle, he suggested an area that had many themes on it to choose from.
What I did, was to slowly go through many of them, then investigating each one that I liked, then checking to see if was compatible with smart phones, ipads, tablets and the like...right from the get-go.

With so many new gadgets coming out, a person should have a theme that will adjust all by itself.

Sure glad I did that right from the start. Saves a lot of grief later on.

:) Tom
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Shawn Martin Premium
@azgorilla
I am the perfect example of what you are talking about. I have three very active and older sites that are not responsive. With the many changes and custom things I have done to these sites it is a process to change them out, which I am dealing with as we speak here.
priceless advice you are offering, priceless. :)

Shawn>>
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azgorilla Premium
@Shawn Martin
Yay! Isn't technology great!? HaH !
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Shawn Martin Premium
@azgorilla
It sure is, lol
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Chris2005 Premium Plus
Thanks Shawn. Not happy with the theme I have now. Hard to change some things. Will book mark when the time comes to change.
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Shawn Martin Premium
@Chris2005
You bet!
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kmer6 Premium
Thank you Shawn for demonstrating the steps of changing our themes. There were several members I know that wanted instructions on how to do this. This is information that we all can use.
Ken
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Shawn Martin Premium
@kmer6
Glad to help :)
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Michelle04 Premium
Hey Shawn. This was a great blog because quite a few people get hung up here and don't know what they are suppose to be looking for. Thanks for sharing! :) Michelle
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Shawn Martin Premium
@Michelle04
Glad you like it :)
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