“Can you give me some advice on selecting a theme?”
That used to be one of the most common questions I received when I worked as a customer support agent for WordPress users.
My answer changed over the years. Initially, themes were rigid. The theme design and layout were pretty much what you got and there was little space for customization.
Classic themes
Classic themes often had:
- A fixed header and footer – If the header displayed a logo on the center and the navigation menu on the right side, modifying their locations required code knowledge. Sometimes code was not enough.
- Fixed content width on pages and posts – If the theme had a full-width design, post and page content could stretch across the screen. However, if the theme had been designed with two-thirds of the screen for content and the remaining one-third for a widget bar, it would be hard to change that.
- Widget sidebars or banners at the top of the homepage – The presence of these elements would depend on the theme you selected. Adding these elements or modifying them would be challenging.
- Design-specific features – Having specific design features such as a carousel on the homepage area, a fixed navigation menu, etc. would depend on the theme’s overall layout and design.
- Limited font and color options – Themes would come with specific fonts and colors and options to change them were limited.
While people could still modify some design aspects such as the font size of the menu, hide the footer, or change the overlay color of the banner with CSS code, major structural changes were complex and sometimes impossible. For example, if you were looking to add a logo to a theme that hadn’t been designed with a logo in mind, not even code might have been enough.
My advice was to pick up the theme based on the overall structure and design in mind.
Theme’s demo content
Back in those days, I would suggest customers to ignore the theme’s demo content. Themes demos often featured random content such as a beauty shop, a gym, or a real estate website. People sometimes thought that if they were building a website for a gym, then it made sense to choose a theme that displayed gym-related content.
I had to explain that the demo content actually didn’t matter. The most important aspect was to select a design and layout that matched their needs. Did the theme have the kind of header area they were looking for? If they wanted a website with a fixed menu, a logo at the center, and a banner at the top, then they had to choose a theme that included this design. It didn’t matter if the theme’s demo showed content about a bookstore and the intended website was a gym. People could always change the content, change the images, and change the text. The important aspect was the overall design, header and footer layout, content width, widget areas, etc.
Sometimes, this explanation was difficult to follow. It wasn’t intuitive. If I were new to WordPress and I needed a website for a coffee shop, I would be too inclined to pick a theme that has some content about coffee shops.
The real challenge was explaining that WordPress themes were fundamentally inflexible and major design changes often required heavy coding or were not possible at all.
The Flexibility of Modern WordPress themes
Now things have changed considerably with the introduction of Gutenberg/Block Editor and Full Site Editing.
Still, there might be some WordPress users how haven’t used the platform in years and might not realize how much has changed. So here’s my updated advice:
Don’t spend too much time picking a theme – If you’re choosing a theme with Full Site Editing options (which is now most of the themes), you will be able to edit and change anything you want. Full site editing has taken Gutenberg/Block editor to the next level by leveraging block customization to all those theme parts that you couldn’t touch before unless you knew some code.
With Full Site Editing, every part of your site – your header area, footer, content area – everything is now a block.
On new themes, your website’s design is organized into templates. There is a template for your Home page, a template for pages, a template for posts, etc.
If you want your header area to look different on whatever theme you have chosen, then you only have to go to the respective template, access the block that corresponds, and modify it.
To help you follow this better. Let’s assume you’ve picked a theme and you want to add an image below the tagline in the header area. Let’s see the steps.
Go to Appearance -> Editor
Go to Templates.
Click the template you want to edit. In this case, I want to edit the Home Page Template.
Once inside the homepage template, click the header area to access the blocks inside the header area. As with the block editor in a page or post, you will see the list of blocks on the left sidebar.
If you want to add an image below the tagline, click the three dots next to this block and select Add After.
Add an image block and then insert an image.
This could be the expected result:
Adding an image after a tagline doesn’t make any sense, but this is only an example of how flexible is now your header area.
Conclusion
Although picking a theme is still important, it’s not as important as before. The theme won’t determine your look & feel anymore. If the theme is new and has options for Full Site Editing, then you will be able to customize it as much as possible. Restrictions based on the theme’s design are now in the past.