Websites. Lots of fun. Great reward. Not all beer and skittles. I learned a lot each and every time. So, here’s some of what’s happened from when I met WordPress, to current:
- Select a WordPress Theme
- Discovering a Builder under your Theme
- A Plugin to excellence
- The Moral of the Story
- The End
- Useful Links
Select a WordPress Theme
And there’s literally thousands. There’s more than you could hope to sort through. Do a search through the marketplaces (WordPress, Envato) and Google the search terms “Best Theme for [client]”.
Might take a while. Interesting. Lots of different things that look the same but you will get some ideas about the basic functionality you want in your deliverables.
Please keep in mind that if you search for “Best *website* for [client]” it is likely that you will find a base theme for WordPress, and you can download it for free. Voila! Your theme was free, you were winning. At last, my love had come along.
But then nothing works. There’s some basic functionality. You don’t know where all these fancy widgets you can see on this other website come from. Yet, you start to put together pages using the other available widgets and your shiny little eyes can see all these other widgets with a big, fat bastard lock on them – “Go Pro”, they say. That is a tool tip, indeed.
Wait – I know you’ve read this far and now you realise this isn’t finished, there’s maybe no shortcut.
Discovering a Builder under your Theme
WordPress uses “builders”, which some themes enjoy a symbiotic relationship with, and will allow you, the website designer / developer to customise elements of the theme to suit your client. Examples of these would be Elementor and WPBakery. Again, you run into the the big fat bastard locks that prompt you to fork over money to “Go Pro”.
So, please take heed – you might want to investigate what widgets and components are available in the free version of whatever builder your theme uses. If you are going to want to customise, you may have to dip into your pocket twice – for a full-featured theme and to upgrade to the Pro version of whatever WP Builder your particular theme uses.
If the investment in reading these few really short paragraphs is a waste of your time, reconsider by thinking through how much more time you could / would have spent thoroughly investigating with the knowledge of where these two pins, the Theme and the Builder, connect to help you deliver that website to your client.
A Plugin to excellence
Your Builder and Theme won’t let you do particular things you’ve seen or realise, now that you’ve gotten this far, that you need to have. There’s a few more fiddly things here, called Plugins. There are heaps of them. Some of them are absolute rubbish. Some of them are extremely cool. Some of them are massive utilitarian and some of them are just throwing a bit of money for a really good looking effect.
Some of these plugins and widgets are silly – you can achieve the same effect if you just put in the time. Don’t forget that just because it says it is a special widget or plugin doesn’t necessarily make it so!
Again, it’s all about the journey. If you find something and you have an open communication with your client and can offer something new that you’ve just found that could make every visitor feel a five-star digital luxurious page experience you should probably contact the client and make the offer that you could do [this] for [that] price. Let them know how it would work to increase value to their end-product. Clients make those kinds of decisions – don’t forget it’s their journey you’ve been let in on. They might not be able to hang around while you do the learning and demonstrate your technical skills, but they are at the party.
The Moral of the Story
What is the moral of the story. You’ve done it all, here. Surely there’s nothing to do but huff in scorn that this idiot bothered sharing all these fuck-ups.
But keep in mind these few things, and maybe the moral of the story is making your life just that little bit easier and it makes everyone just that little bit happier?
- Investigate your Theme and its Builder – if there’s functionality you need or might want later on you may have to budget for that “Go Pro” bullet.
- Be prepared to explore – you might often be able to mashup bits from all manner of places, but some things might work and some might not, pro or no. Be prepared to exit the box and investigate working with what you’ve got.
- Keep an open communication with your client – if there’s something extra on top of the basic package and they want their product to own that avenue, they might be willing to authorise the extra on top of the original quote.
- Fiddling will send you blind – You get into editing things, you just need to alter the spacing slightly, you just want 1px extra on that font size here, there and everywhere. New colour across 20 items on 10 different pages? It’s all time. And the more you look at it, the more likely you will go blind. You will get caught up in little things and while every little bit counts, you don’t want to end up at the bottom of an avalanche where the client’s not going to come to the party on your artistic exploration – that’s something you’re going to have to get clever learning about doing on your own.
The End
Get comfy in delivery great results and goal to get peaceful with how you do it, and repeat.
All these things turn out beautifully.