It’s been a little while since I’ve done any WordPress webinars or in-person classes. But I finally got around to setting up a few. Just to clarify, webinars take place online only whereas classes are conducted in small groups in the Los Angeles area. Those sexy folks that are on my email list always get the first opportunity to sign-up and they always get a coupon code for discounts.
When the same question crops up again and again, it’s time for a blog post!
Changing your WordPress theme can be a scary prospect if you’ve already invested a lot of time and effort building your site – what if you click the button and ‘poof!’ your site becomes dust?!
So here’s a guide to what will and won’t change about your site when you switch themes. Depending on the specific themes you are switching between your experience may be more or less tricky.
The overarching rule is that anything that is a core WordPress feature will remain, and all plugins and their features will remain, but anything that is theme-specific will no longer be available to you.
So let’s dig a little deeper into what this means.
The current default theme Twenty Eleven is generally a good starter theme for many bloggers, but it does have a couple of annoying quirks such as not placing a sidebar on single posts, even if you select it as your…
One of the reasons why WordPress is so awesome is because it makes building powerful websites pretty easy. Pick a theme, add some content, hit Publish and there you have it. Lack of technical know-how is no longer a barrier, and the array of shiny, sexy themes that are available along with the inexpensivenss of it all can make it dangerously easy to under-think the process of building a website. But while WordPress and its eco-system have made many parts of the process simple and taken the grunt work out of making a site, the one thing that YOU still have to do, is the analytical thinking and planning behind your site.
For your site to be an effective business tool, it must reflect the core goals and missions of your company. Whereas many of us start the planning of a site by looking at the available WordPress themes and letting those designs sway our decisions, we really need to be starting from a more strategic point of view and making decisions about themes, plugins etc, based on the bigger picture.
So before you put pixel to screen, or start buying themes, consider the following.
