Update: I’m happy to say that KeriLynn and I finally sorted out the mess of that other designer’s theme! She was able to create a new template file and I set it as a home.php file to override the designer’s functions which were already overriding WordPress settings for what should display on the homepage. Whew! It takes a lot of patience to sort out and fix bad coding in some cases, and most designers won’t help you do this for a third party’s theme (and I can’t blame them!). I couldn’t recommend KeriLynn highly enough, whether you need help sorting out an existing theme or creating a brand new one. She has the patience of a saint and the stubbornness of a mule (that’s a compliment!) — exactly what I needed to help me through this most recent WordPress nightmare. So a huge thanks to KeriLynn!
If you follow me on Twitter, you’ve probably seen some recent rants about WordPress theme designers. You see, I’m launching or redesigning around a half dozen sites at once. I figured the quickest option in this case was to purchase premium base themes and then customize them to get exactly what I wanted (which is what I did with this site recently — it kicked off this series of launches and re-launches).
Two theme designers I purchased base themes for were ridiculous. They made the themes unnecessarily complicated — overriding basic WP functions with custom versions that simply didn’t work as they claimed. The support for these problem themes was terrible. While I did get this one fixed up after some drastic optimization (extra weeks of time lost), the other theme for my new fiction author site (AriaKlein.com) hasn’t been so lucky. I had to make design concessions I’m not happy with because the theme designer’s back-end options didn’t work as labeled, he took a long time to respond to support tickets, ignored questions and complaints on the sales site comments, and when he finally gave a solution it wasn’t even what I asked for.
I’ve wanted to pull my hair out for weeks over this. But I had a chat with KeriLynn Engel of Dreaming Iris Design over on my pen name Twitter account, and then she was referred to me again by Evelyn Lafont. Now I rarely turn to WP designers for help with customization. I can generally get any theme to do what I want. But this one stumped me. She was the only person who had ideas that could potentially work around this designer’s problems. (Many designers I know won’t even look at another designer’s code for you because of the sheer mess they might be asked to clean up.) Even though I haven’t implemented all of the possibilities yet (as I’m considering just scrapping the theme altogether for fear of more problems with every update), I wanted to bring KeriLynn to your attention.
While I can always go back to designing and coding my own WordPress themes from scratch, I know that isn’t possible for every reader here. I recommend WordPress highly as an ideal platform for both a professional site and blog to promote your freelance writing services. But sometimes you’ll need help troubleshooting or customizing something small, and you won’t be able to find an answer easily online. And sometimes you’ll want a fully custom design developed for a new website or blog. If those things happen, you should have someone in mind to go to. And for that, I wanted to recommend Kerilynn. She has been one of the most responsive and insightful WordPress designers I’ve had the pleasure to deal with.
So the next time you need WordPress help, make sure you have Dreaming Iris Design bookmarked.
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Don’t get me started on WP theme designers. I purchased a theme a few months ago and am having a hell of a time customizing it. I’m not sure who the heck designed the template, but for some reason the designer thought it was a good idea to have pictures post above blog posts instead of to the right or left. I can’t figure out how to change it. Also, bullet points don’t work. I have to manually enter a numbered list. I’ve emailed the company I purchased the template from numerous times, but they’re no help. Ugh!
Those are probably easy enough fixes. If you want to email me the details, I’ll take a look and see if I can help. I had one screw up lists before (consistently) — can’t figure out how you can miss that! The images above posts are becoming more and more common as theme defaults. If they have their own admin area, you may be able to disable the images there and manually add them to posts wherever you want. Without knowing the specific theme I can’t be certain though. Anyway, if you want me to take a look at anything, you can email me at jenn@allfreelancewriting.com.
Thanks, Jennifer. I needed to read this. Being tempted by so many downloadable themes out there, I now understand it can get complicated. I’ve bookmarked Dreaming Iris.
Free themes can actually be better than premium ones. That’s for two reasons:
1. You can freely review the code before deciding to use that theme. With premium ones you usually pay without being able to see the kind of coding job you’ll have to deal with.
2. More people generally use the free themes than paid ones. That means there are more people who may have experienced the same issues and posted solutions online — which greatly speeds up customization and bug fixes from the themes’ authors.
Premium themes have their advantages as base themes in that they’re often more feature-rich and fewer people use them. But other than theme clubs like Elegant Themes where you can expect a good amount of consistency, I find the premium coding jobs are often much worse than the free ones inexplicably. In an attempt to make their own admin areas for users (supposed to make it easier to customize), they actually sometimes makes things harder on the user — especially when they screw with basic WordPress functions or there’s a bug in that admin area that they struggle to figure out. That’s happened with two of the last six premium themes I’ve purchased. Others still had some issues (many themes do), but they were easy fixes that I was able to knock out myself in a few minutes.
If you’re new to WordPress, I’d recommend downloading some free themes first just to play with the backend, learn how to customize the CSS, and learn how to make template changes. We all start somewhere, and with so many of those available, it makes learning about it much easier now. But if you don’t have any desire to do that, it definitely helps to have a WP expert around to help with customizations or even create a new design for you if you don’t want to bother customizing something yourself.