The next thing I needed was a theme. From what I understood, themes are a quick and easy way to get a visual “look” for a site. The default is a WordPress blog looking deal that I wasn’t too interested in. If you browse some of these new eCommerce guys, you see some really slick stuff out there that I definitely had to have.
At the time of this posting you can tell that I’m not quite there yet…
Theme, Themes, Thames – not always a river in London
I digress. I launched the site, just now, to get some content out there. It’s not fun writing these posts if exactly zero people are reading them. So, I deleted stuff, moved it around, changed some colors and uploaded some poorly rendered shots of stuff I’m working on. It’s important to note that I didn’t start with this theme. I had this one:
Not too shabby.
I really liked it a lot. It was cool, it has these futuristic sounding “parallax” sections. Very slick. The price was right too, $0.00. Sold.
To install it, all I did was download the installer, go to the themes button in the raumfurniture.com/wp-admin WordPress editor thing and upload, then activate, it. My site looked exactly like the demo. Just be sure that you don’t activate it when you save any changes.
After spending a few hours trying to change the purple buttons and change the wave picture to the cool one of stacked firewood that I have, I started to get frustrated. I was reading CSS code, browsing forums, doing everything. It started to look bad too. I might have spent an entire day on just messing around with it. What’s worse is that I was starting to wonder how I would add a products and blog page that looked the same because I had deciphered that when it said “single page theme” it meant exactly that.
The price was right too, $0.00. Sold.
I needed a way out.
ThemeForest
I found the lovely folks at ThemeForest. All I did was look for themes that integrated with WooCommerce and had some level of personal support for at least 6 months. I should be able to figure it out by then. They have tons of themes over there. Some are free and most are pretty cheap. I eventually settled on the Shopkeeper theme.
He even has a beard.
My mind said, for the price of what the theme costs and the sweet Visual Composer plugin freebie, the price is right again. Up to now, I’m still cheaper per amortized month than a pre-built schmuck online plug-and-play helper doodad. Score.
I know, my site is far, far, far from looking like a pro built it. I’m working on it every day, just behind the scenes. I’ve got a color palette picked out, which I gather is an important thing. That will probably be the next blog post – so get ready for an exciting read there.
If you need help choosing or installing a theme, leave a comment. There are tons of resources for this stuff but I’m happy to share some of my more nitty-gritty details if needed.
Until next time, eye see you.
Berlin street art at its finest.