 Thank you. Good morning. Glad to see everybody up bright and early. So part of what I do for a living is help people with their branding. And when you're working out your branding, a big part of that is to use your experience in your website. You need to know who you're making your website for and what it needs to do. So the most people start is by choosing a theme. You know, you could build your own theme, but most people go shopping for a theme to get started out. So that's what I want to talk to you today is how to find a theme that works for what you need to do. So a theme is a collection of files that work together with the WordPress software that styles what shows you what things look like. Why you use a theme, it customizes your headers, your page templates, what your sidebars look like, basically what it looks like. This is what it looks like with an unstyled theme. If it's just straight up, I think this is in Genesis, but there's no theme applied. That's with a theme applied. And it's a simple theme, but you can see where the logo is in there. The social media is up at the top. It's got a color theme. Let's see. So the first thing you have to figure out is what kind of website you're building, who it's for, and what your viewers need to see. This is an example of a magazine style website. If you are a blogger or you're an information provider and you want to get a lot of information right out of the get, you do something like this. This is e-commerce. It showcases your products right on the screen. This is brochure style. This is just information about the business. When you're looking for themes, you have options of free themes or premium themes. And there's a lot of things to take into consideration before you choose one. WordPress is open source, which means that anybody has access to the code to build upon. So the free themes, sorry, I keep saying um, so free themes are built on this code. And premium themes are also built on this code, but there's proprietary styling that's included, and that's what they actually charge for. Pros and cons. I'm going to show you later where to go and find the free themes or the premium themes, but there's many, many, many free themes in the WordPress repository to choose from. They're often easier to customize. They don't have a lot of bells and whistles, and they're free. Cons are that because they're free, they're often not updated. WordPress changes its software often, and themes need to be updated to follow along. And if they're not updated and you have an outdated theme, it can break your site. And sometimes they're not as fancy in style. Premium themes are often supported because people pay for them. There's money behind the coders who keep the updated. There's a lot more flexibility and customization, and the code is written better. The cons is that there are additional costs for the support. There's annual fees to keep them updated, and they're not free. Your theme must be responsive. You have to make sure when you're choosing a theme that the code is written so that it shows good on a mobile device because Google will penalize you for that. That's just an example of what it looks like. When you're looking for themes whether they're premium or free, check out what other people have to say about them. You can usually find some sort of forum where there's comments or a rating system. This is where you would go to the theme directory to find free themes. That's what it looks like. And this particular theme shows you in the repository how many active installs this theme has. It's got over 40,000 active installs, so there's 40,000 people who trust this theme. And there's 139 five-star ratings. When you're shopping for themes, if you find a theme that has 250 active installs and not a lot of great ratings, it's probably been tried and tested and you might want to keep looking. Themeify is one of the places where you can go to get premium themes. There's elegant themes. There's a Genesis theme, places where you go and you buy it. You also can find information from other people who have used it to figure out if that's going to work for you. Pagebuilders, if you guys heard Aaron Reimann talk yesterday about pagebuilders, there's pluses and minuses. The biggest thing is that if you use a theme that has a page builder and you ever want to change your theme, you potentially have to redo your whole site because they're so reliant on the page builders. They do make it very easy to design for beginners so some people are attracted to that and see what else. There's not a lot of coding required. You don't have to have a lot of coding knowledge if you pick a theme with a page builder. But like I say, end plugins have to be compatible. Child themes. If you're going to build a website and you're going to do any sort of customization to it, you should definitely install a child theme. At the end of this slideshow, I have resources. I have links where you can go to learn to do all this stuff. It's super easy to do a child theme. It's basically just two files that gets installed. You activate it just like you activate a regular theme and you put all of your customizations in there. That way, if you ever change your theme or when you update your core theme, you don't lose your customizations. If you make all the customizations right inside of your core theme, you will have to do them again. This is an example of what it looks like in the back end. I have Genesis installed and then a custom child theme on top of it. If you deactivated the child theme and just activated Genesis, it would lose all the styling of the site. It would just go back to plain black and white and boring. Plug-in compatibility. If you're building an e-commerce website and you want to use something like WooCommerce, you have to make sure that your theme is compatible with that plugin that you want to use because there are special page layouts that are required in order to use that software. Any of these plugins that you want to use, when you're looking for your theme, make sure it says that it's compatible with the plugin that you'd like to use. Other things to consider. You want to make sure it's SEO Optimize. A big part of that is in the coding and you wouldn't know it. I have links at the end of places where you can go and run your site through and it will check the code and rate the SEO optimization. Navigation options. You want to make sure that when you're designing your site that the theme has options for very clear and easy to understand navigation because that's one of the biggest things that a user... They will leave your site quicker if they can't figure out how to find what they need. So navigation is super important. Make sure it has social media integration where somewhere there's a way for you to put your social media links and have them show up as buttons because you want that cross traffic. The short codes. If the theme runs on short codes, which they often do, it's similar to page builders and if you build it using the short codes that they write into the theme and then you change your theme, you're going to lose all of your customization and rebuilding the pages is time consuming. So that's just a consideration. And the same thing goes for widgets. Some themes come with custom widgets that allow you to put certain things in certain places and it's theme specific. Resources. I just put together a list of places where you can go to get more information about all of the stuff. I feel like I'm talking really fast. And I'm almost through my slides. So I guess we're going to have a lot of time for questions. These themes are uploaded... I mean these slides are uploaded on the Slack channel for this talk. It's there. Sunday, 9 a.m. Nikki Pink is the Slack channel. They're also on Slide Share. Oh, and the link is in Slack as well. In Slide Share. And so... Any questions? Yeah. So I'm looking to get a theme as a repository. And I want to... I'm not sure if it fits my business or some questions I should ask myself. Okay. So if you're designing a theme for, say, a motel, what do your customers want to see when it opens up? They want to make... They want to see a box that says Book Now, or what's available, a picture of the hotel. So when you're thinking about the theme, you want to make sure that you have the elements that your customer wants to see. If you do an e-commerce, you want to have it so that they immediately can see samples of your products. If you're doing a theme for an example. Sorry? Pet City. Okay, so Pet City would have... You want to see immediately what you do. There should be a place for a header so that you can see a picture. And then maybe there's a box that says Book Now, or Schedule Now that leads to an appointment calendar. Or Call Us Now, or... Does that help? Do you generally recommend or do you generally work in Genesis? Do you give press names or do you have a preference or how do you decide what are some of the factors that help you figure out your scheme? What I love the most about Genesis is that you have to use a child theme. So Genesis is called a framework. It's a theme, but it's a very naked... This doesn't have any styling. So you have to put a child theme in order to style your scene, but that framework is always the foundation. So no matter how often you update the framework, your styling always stays. And it makes it very easy to change it. Genesis has great code. It's written well. And so I use it a lot. I don't use it for everything because I like a little bit more design freedom sometimes. But I do like themes that are a framework. Yeah, go ahead, Tom. What are some themes that e-commerce can have? Because I've heard of Genesis themes on how to do e-commerce. I don't actually do a ton of e-commerce. When I have done e-commerce sites, I buy my themes from Woo. Because then I know for a fact they're Woo-compatible. But I have worked on other client sites where they've already had it installed and it's worked okay. So as long as it says it's Woo-compatible, I would at least try it. I'm sorry? That makes it compatible? Okay, cool. Yeah? Of the X theme? I love the X theme. I use it a lot for everything. I don't think I'm actually supposed to technically recommend anything. But it works. So X is a huge... It's one of those themes that's huge and it has tons of bells and whistles. For a lot of my client's purposes, they don't build gigantic sites. So the page load isn't... It's a really big theme. It's not a really big site. So... And it's just the amount of styling opportunities that it offers. So I mean, I personally like them. Developers will argue with me all day long that they're no good. There's themes that you can buy. There's one called X. There's one called Jupiter. There's one called Avada. It's a framework-style theme. And you have... But what they did is they took a theme and they built a whole ton of sample pages. Like sample... Basically, they did the customizer for you. And they show you demos and then you can install their sample pages. But because the customizer options are so vast, the design options are crazy, which you can do with them. But they're big themes. They're big and they're a little bloated and there's stuff in there that you don't need and there's an argument to be made for the fact that that's not ideal for your page load. If you have a huge site or if you have a ton of media that's already going to make your page load slow, then you might want to pick a theme that's got a little cleaner code. Does that make sense? Yeah. Ask the theme builder. Usually they know because the... keep in touch with them. So if it's something that you... if there's only one plugin that you can use for what you're trying to accomplish, then I would reach out to a theme developer and ask them if it's compatible. Because a lot of times they'll just look at the code and they'll tell you whether it is or not. But oftentimes, if one plugin doesn't work, another one might. And sometimes it's just trial and error. Hi. Sorry. She's pointing, but I couldn't see where. Okay. So the question is, when you're shopping for a theme, they present it a certain way when they're selling it. And then when you install it and you look at your site, it looks nothing like the demo theme that they have up. The theme developers will style out a theme to sell it. They usually offer the customizations which is available through a file that's an XML file. You can download it. Usually it says something like import the demo content. If they have different pages that are available, you can choose the page and it'll populate your site with either dummy content but all the styling will be there. And then you can sort of, based on what they did in the demo thing, you can customize it further for your own needs. Was that what you were asking? Okay. That's another thing I would pay attention to when you're shopping for a theme. Try to find their documentation. Try to find if the people who develop the theme have YouTube tutorials or step-by-step guides on how to do different things because the theme will have a whole list of features that they are available. So if one of the features is an integrated calendar book, you can use it to an integrated calendar booking system. The feature is there, but if you don't know how to customize it or configure it, you're going to be lost. So check out the documentation and make sure that they have instructions to help you through that. Yeah. So, Nikki, the title said how to choose a theme. What is your mindset? When you meet with a client and you are narrowing out the scope of it, what is your process? Do you show demo themes? Do you select something? How's your procedure with a client? Well, because my relationship with a client usually starts with the branding process, by the time we get through that, I've got a pretty good idea of what goals they're trying to hit with their website. So the way that I do it is we define the pages that they need in their website and then we figure out a goal for each one of the web pages. So the homepage, say you're a public speaker and your homepage's goal is to capture the emails of people who are interested in having you speak at an event. I personally sketch it out on paper and I figure out what does somebody need to see to achieve that goal and then I go out, and I do much more custom stuff. Now I work with things where I can just build the thing myself, but if I was going out looking for a theme, I would search through themes that had the elements that I needed. Does that help? It's almost done. We've gone through colors, we've gone through fonts, we've gone through the feel and tone that they're looking for, we've gone through their message that they want. We've talked about the pages that are going to be on their website and then usually by that point we have a pretty, that no like trust relationship and then I pretty much go in and build out the site and then when I have it all built out as I envision it, then we tweak. We figure out what neat works for them. You've never had any kind of hiccups with that? I mean of course, a lot of my guys hiccups, but I've never had anybody say absolutely not let's reinvent the wheel. That's never happened. Because I spend so much time up front working with them, I already know, I end up knowing what they want more than they know by the time we get to it. But that's a web designer and some people are just trying to do this for themselves. So in that case, I would do that work up front, figure out what you need from your website and then go and find the theme that works best for you. Tell? Yeah. Well, yes, but you're probably going to, well, let's see, what you could do is once you install, because your child theme and you have customizations built into your main theme, you can actually copy and paste that CSS code exactly as it is into your child theme and then if your main theme updates, your child theme would override it. The only thing I would be careful about is you don't want your entire website's CSS in your child theme. You just want to try to just pick out what you've changed. But yeah, that's a way to do it after the fact. You make the CSS changes in a child theme. The developer yesterday suggested to be per page CSS modifications and it's less complicated especially for folks like these just start to happen. Yeah, so that's true. That's very true until you change your theme and it doesn't have per page CSS. Okay, I've never used one but if that's the case then I would assume that's how it would work. So the plugin is basically acting as your child theme. On a per page page. Sure. I think it's six to one half dozen of the other probably. Yeah, I mean if you're choosing a theme if you're not going to build a theme from scratch so the question was if I understand correctly finding a theme that has the style sheet that looks basically what you want when you're making little tweaks, right? Yeah, so if you're not going to design it from scratch then yes that's what you'd want to do. You go shopping for a theme that basically looks it doesn't even need to necessarily look the way you want it to look it has to have the features that you need because you can change a website drastically by doing different colors and changing the header. So and that's the kind of stuff that changes and font changes the stuff that you put in your child theme. No, it's a standalone theme. Yeah, it's a premium theme that you buy by itself. So if you're designing the developer is not building the theme from scratch based on your design? Okay, so the question is if you're a website designer who hands over the design to a developer you use a theme in that case. Most developers, if that's all they do and they're working with independent designers they usually write their own themes. So as the designer you would do page layout which would include the elements that you need and then you would leave that up to the developer to decide how he wants to do that. Yep, yeah. Layout and what I've added to this plugin I like this plot I wanted to do this so that we could do themes like where we draw that line. You can get pretty specific with themes it's just they could take you a really long time to find one. So one of the beautiful things about Genesis is it's really naked and then you work with plugins. The issue with having too many different plugins is they're written by different companies with different coding styles so often times if you have too many trying to work with each other something's incompatible and it'll break your site. You also don't want to have too too many plugins because it makes every time somebody calls the page and it opens up it takes a lot of information to load it makes your site slow. So if the functionality is built into the theme chances are it runs a little bit more efficiently than if you had a whole bunch of plugins doing it. So it's kind of a but if it's a functionality that you absolutely don't want to lose if you ever change your theme then I would go with a plugin. How's my time? I use the X theme and I don't think I'm supposed to recommend anything but that is I use the X theme for at least half of my sites. Do you do the X theme? I think it's $63 per license but you do have to buy a license for every single site you install it on. Yep. Compare X to what you designed? No. I don't know what you designed as. It's another very cool feature theme along the lines of that. Okay. Just one second. X has its own community. They have their own conferences like this. They're very proactive with the development of it. There's some pretty great people behind it and what it does the functionality of it is just designer it makes things very easy and efficient. I can get a lot done with it. There was somebody. Yeah. The other big themes that have all that sort of the ones I know of, there's one called Avada. There's one called Jupiter. Divi. Of course. Divi. I haven't used Divi myself yet but it's similar. The functionality, that's from elegant themes. Hey. Have you ever used thesis theme? I've not used thesis. I've heard great things about it but I've not used it. Yeah. I haven't used it. From what I understand that's a real the developers love that theme because the way the code is written but from a designer span to one I don't know if it's so easy to use. Right. I don't anymore but when I started I did. When I was starting working with these themes these big themes I would find one that I liked and I would import all the demo content that's a really good way to learn how to work the theme because once the information is there and you just have to figure out where to change it then you learn how to just do it yourself. I'm sorry. She was asking if I when I install a theme if I import all the demo content I don't do that anymore but when I started I did because it was a good way to learn all of the possibilities. X Theme has a page builder that's packaged with it called Cornerstone and I think as of this week they're releasing it as a standalone plugin that you can use with other themes. And Cornerstone Cornerstone is a page builder the reason it's different is because when you're in the back end instead of visual composer and Divi you see the boxes and the box says there's an image here. Cornerstone as a page builder shows you the whole picture. So your back end is broken up into blocks but it's you actually see exactly what's in it. So if you have a say for instance you have a contact form that's in one of your blocks it shows the actual contact form. So for designing it makes it very fast. Anyone else? Oh yep. It's Lollot or X. It's developed by a company called Theme Co. That's it? Oftentimes I just google I'll google what's the best theme for a speaker. Somebody has probably done these are the top 10 themes for a speaker. And then I'll go through them one by one and I'll be like oh maybe not that one oh no they don't have good ratings you know what I mean and just narrow it down that way. But if it's a topic where you can't just necessarily google something pay attention to what functionality it needs to have and the ratings. Those are the two most important things. Okay so I'll be around all day I'll be here till the end of the day if you have any questions please feel free to come up and ask me. I'm going to be in the happiness bar at some point. My slides are available on the Slack channel and I would love to give you a URL but I don't know how to do that. It's I'll tweet it the URL to the slides if anybody's interested so you have the resources and stuff. Thank you.