 So again, my name is Christina Hills and I'm talking about choosing the right theme for your site. So I'm going to walk you through the steps that I go when trying to decide a theme. So as I said early in the beginning, the theme is the look and feel. And these are examples of three of my students' sites that they've created. So it's the look and feel, the colors, the pictures, how things are laid out. That's called the theme design. So some themes are really simple like a bicycle. It's really easy to just get on a bicycle and ride and there's not a lot that you have to do. And some themes are more complex like flying a plane. I find with beginners sometimes they jump to the complex ones and then they get overwhelmed and they give up. So my goal is to not have anybody ever give up. So simple versus complex. Like I mentioned earlier, WordPress is kinesthetic. You have to sort of move through things. So you may start out with something really simple but just know it can turn into something gorgeous and complex as complex as you want it to. So the WordPress free theme directory is where I go to evaluate themes. You can evaluate them from inside the admin dashboard. I find it personally a little more claustrophobic because everything's kind of tiny to fit in. So I evaluate by going to WordPress.org slash themes or you just click on themes at the top. Any theme you find in WordPress.org is free. So you're able to use it because it's integrated to the inside of WordPress. The great thing about themes here is they've been vetted. The WordPress community makes sure that anyone who puts a theme in is following best practices. So designers and developers put themes into the directory as a way of generating business. Kind of like you know when you go to the mall and people are standing there with a little samples of food and you taste the food and then you decide which food court you want to go to. Think of WordPress.org themes that way. They're putting out the free theme for you for you to try out and then if you like it you should buy the professional version. And I'll talk more about that. So what do you do? You go to WordPress.org and you browse around themes or maybe somebody's recommended a theme. The theme we're going to use today is the Sydney theme. So I'm going to walk you through the process of evaluating a theme. Today we're going to use Sydney. You don't have to use it. It's just the example for today. But this is the thought process that you want to go through when you're looking for a theme. So you find the theme you want and here's how you want to start evaluating it. I hope everybody can see this slide. Is it too tiny? Can you see it? I look at when was it last updated? Right? Okay, when I took this screenshot August 31st of this year. That's pretty recent. If you look for a theme and it's really old, it hasn't been updated in a while. You might think, hmm, this theme developer might have abandoned the theme or is not as active. You want to look at how many active installs. Right up there. How many active installs? So why is that important? So an active install means how many people around the world are using this theme. So for the Sydney theme, there's over 200,000 people using it. The reason why that's significant is if there's a lot of people using it, that means there's better likely that any kind of bugs or any kind of issues have been worked out. Like if you find a theme and there's only 100 people using it, it's not being tested as well as one that 200,000 people. Because if you've got 200,000 people using this theme and the theme has a problem, the developers are going to hear about it and they're going to fix it. So it shows that it's an active theme. And also I look at the stars. Like, does it have a lot of good stars on it? Now we all know about star ratings. You know, you go to Amazon and there's good stars and bad stars for products you love and somebody's dumped on it. So I just look at, does this have a majority of good ratings? That means people like this theme. The next thing I do is I visit the theme home page. So I go to the theme home page and I just kind of click around. And I want to see do they have a demo, right? So you want to find the demo of the site. So here's the demo of the Sydney theme and I took a big screenshot. So why do you want to look at the demo? The demo helps you first off to see, do you like the way they've designed this theme? Do you like how it looks? The other thing the demo does is it gives you a guideline when you're building your site of how you can make yours look, even if it's not exactly the same. So I always try to have the demo up. Excuse me. Then I browse the documentation on the developer's site. So when I say browse the documentation, don't fall asleep and say, oh my gosh, do I have to read all this documentation? No, just click around and know that they have documentation. Someone once recommended a theme to me. It was a new theme. They said it was really awesome. And because I teach beginners, I looked and they had like no documentation. So I said to myself, this might be a great theme. To me, they don't have enough documentation right now. So I'm just going to wait. If they've got documentation, that shows they put effort into it. You want to pick a theme that people have put effort into because then you can find your answers. And do they have a premium version? Meaning, could I upgrade to a paid version? Now, why is that important? It's important because if they have a paid version, then they've got a business model that's shown that they're making money, they're offering it for sale, and they're going to be around a while. It's a real bummer when you pick a theme, you fall in love with it, and then the theme disappears, the developers moved on to something else and they're no longer interested in that theme anymore. So by having a pro version, it shows that they're in business and they're going to stick around. Do you have to buy it right away? No, you should try the theme out and see if you like it. And then evaluate how active their forum is. So go look at the forum and see are people posting and are people responding. When I'm evaluating a theme, at this point I'm not reading a lot on the forum. I'm just going to see, hey, is it active and are people getting responses? And let me just say one more thing about support forums. When you go to support forums, the purpose of the forum is specific questions about the theme or the plugin. So don't ask kind of irrelevant questions that you could find elsewhere. The other thing about when you go to a forum is always post the URL of wherever you're having a problem. I see so many people go to the forum and say, my menu is not showing up, and then someone has to come back and say give us your URL, because people need to see where you're at. So that's just a little tip about forums. Okay, so I've gone through my evaluation process. This evaluation process is like five minutes. It's like click, click, click. Do they have a forum? Is it active? Do they have a homepage? So don't think you have to spend a ton of time. This is like a five minute I'm clicking through. Alright, so I've decided I want to use the Sydney theme. I go inside and I'm going to do this with you when I get to the demo part. You want to go in and then you want to click to install it and you want to install it from inside. You could download it from WordPress.org and then upload it, but that's an extra step. It's so much easier to do everything from inside WordPress. So you find it, you see where that's circled, and then you click to install it. Here's one of the other questions I asked myself. It's not really a deal breaker, and this is, once I've installed it, I'm still trying to decide if I like it, is how many widgets does the theme have? And if you don't know what a widget, how many people know what widgets are? Okay, most of the room, but not everybody. I think of widgets like bookshelves. So you've got bookshelves up and there are places where you could put something. You don't have to put something on the bookshelf. That's how you think of widgets. There are places where you can put things. So how many widgets does it have? Just trying to get an idea. How many page templates does it have? So what does that mean? Remember we have blog posts and we have pages. Posts are the blog, like your diary. Pages are like your about us, your contact us, your services page. And this again is not a deal breaker, but it's nice when it gives different options. Meaning maybe you want a page that has a right sidebar, or a left sidebar, or sidebars on both right and left, or no sidebars. These are just different options. Again, this isn't a deal breaker, but it's nice to have. And here's the thing about WordPress. If it doesn't have something, it can always be added on. You can always get into the code and add it on, but I'm not going to go into code today. Then I always look for examples of people using the theme. Now sometimes that's a little bit harder, but maybe the developer has a showcase of examples. So here are two of my students who've used the Sydney theme. And then here's a couple more using the Sydney theme. And notice this one has this big bold homepage like these others, but this gal decided to do hers a little bit different. So often a question I have is, boy, if I get an off the shelf theme, is my site going to look like everybody else's? And the answer is no. You can make it unique to you. So again, spend time on the demo site. And then if you like the free, buy the pro. So why am I encouraging you to buy the pro? Is because the pro will often come with more features. And also the pro is usually not that expensive. And so by buying the pro, it helps the company stay in business. It's under $100. If you're making money from your site or getting value from it, I definitely recommend buying the pro. And often there's a feature you'll want. And you might not know that yet when you're using the free one. If you find a site that you like and you want to know what theme are they using, you might want to write this down. WPthemeDetector.com. WPthemeDetector.com. You go there and you put in the URL of the website you like. And it will let you know what theme is being used or what plugins. If it's using a custom theme that a designer built for them, it'll let you know. I'm a big advocate of using the off the shelf themes because if you get a custom design theme, now this statement really depends upon who you are. So if you're a big agency, you've got a big budget. Hiring web designers is an awesome thing. If you're on a shoestring budget starting out, you don't have tons of money to throw away, not throw away, to spend, to invest. Start with off the shelf. Because off the shelf themes has a huge community using it. And your site's going to change over the years. So I'm just showing you some screenshots of my site over the past 10 years, how it's going to change. So know that as your business grows, as time goes on, as you add more stuff, maybe your business shifts and changes a little bit, your site's going to look different. So that is common. So when picking a theme, you want to go with a reputable company, right? Like I showed you, go to WordPress.org, see if it's got a lot of users. Look at the popularity, evaluate the theme demo, evaluate the documentation. Do they have it? Do they have videos? If you're a video person, maybe you want to see videos. If you like to read, maybe you want more written documentation. Does it have good support? Meaning are they answering questions? And don't let price be a deciding factor. When you think about getting a design for under $100, it's pretty amazing. We're $30, so definitely do buy the pro. And just try it out. Sometimes I have people say, oh, should I pick this theme or that theme? I say, have you tried it? They say, no. I said, just try it out. So that's a great thing about WordPress. You can just try stuff.