You’ve got WordPress set up, you’ve installed your favorite theme, and now you want more. You want to learn how to customize a WordPress theme so it looks just right. Where do you get started? How hard is it?
You might think the hardest part of the process is learning WordPress or doing something fancy with code. In fact, it’s learning a few basic concepts and applying them when you want to customize your theme. There are even some fantastic free tools and WordPress plugins available to make this process enjoyable.
You’re in a new city and looking to grab dinner. You walk by a busy restaurant. You see customers laughing and having a good time. You glance at the restaurant across the street and see one couple by the window. Otherwise, the place looks deserted. Where are you eating?
This is commonly referred to in psychology circles as social proof. In summary, human beings seem to be hardwired to look to their peers for guidance. This groupthink probably served us well in prehistoric times. You see others in the group start to run, so you start running too. If you stop to look, you might be dinosaur lunch.
So, what does social proof have to do with increasing conversion rates?
If you look at the best practices expounded by most WordPress professionals, you’ll find one related to plugins that goes something like this: when a plugin is deleted, it should remove all traces of itself. No meta data, no extra tables, nothing.
This approach sounds great and it feels downright refreshing to any seasoned WordPress developer. It’s clean, and it respects the existing plugin system, which follows this two-step logic:
When you deactivate a plugin, nothing is removed, but the plugin is disabled.
When you delete a plugin, you get a confirmation screen, and then everything is removed.
Easy right? If you’re thinking about maybe using a plugin again later, you should just deactivate it. If you never plan to use it again, you should just delete it.
The big problem: Most WordPress users have no idea about these subtleties, nor are they 100% sure if they’re going to use a plugin again. The even bigger problem: Removing certain plugin data can have disastrous consequences. If someone has used a plugin extensively to set up their site, deletes it for any multitude of reasons, and then re-installs it, everything is gone.
You might be aware of weak spots in your business, but are you being honest with yourself about them?
When you first start a business, it’s usually just you, or maybe you and a co-founder. You do almost everything: sales, marketing, product development, design, customer service, budgets, hiring, etc.
To have a moderately successful business, you need to be good in at least a few of these areas, but it’s really rare for any person to be great in all of these areas. It’s a common scenario: a developer who builds great software and provides stellar support, but doesn’t know much about marketing. A marketer who knows how to sell and drive business, but really doesn’t understand product development or design.
To be a great business over the long term you need to be great in all of those areas. Otherwise, you’re struggling against your competition with a hand tied behind your back. This is one reason why multiple co-founders with complementary skills can work so well. But, what if you’re a single founder or you have co-founders with similar skills?
Most business owners eventually become somewhat aware of their business weak spots over time. For me, this meant going through two distinct phases.
Earlier this summer, we launched Collections, the first WordPress theme that we know of that leverages Backbone.js to add single page application (SPA) experiences (e.g., load new content without a full page refresh) in the theme. Now that the theme is in the wild, I would like to share some of our experiences building the theme through a series of posts about Collections. These posts will specifically emphasize the integration of Backbone.js into the theme.
At the outset, we decided that the SPA features would follow the progressive enhancement philosophy. First and foremost, we wanted to build a solid WordPress theme. Then, we wanted to make it special by adding SPA features on top of it (e.g., fast page loading, transition animations). Fortunately, this approach paid off as we were able to create a WordPress theme that did not need to compromise WordPress standards in order to implement SPA features.
Howdy! After spending the last couple of months working on a trial basis, I’m stoked to announce that I’m officially joining The Theme Foundry team as a developer! It has been a great pleasure so far to work with such a dedicated, creative, thoughtful group, and I look forward to continuing on in my new capacity.
A bit about me: I’ve been working in the web realm for the past eight years, and working with WordPress for the last five. Before joining The Theme Foundry, I was a freelance web developer and occasional designer, working mostly on custom WordPress sites for clients. Before that, I worked with the fantastic web production team at Grist.org. I also have an MBA and an interest in sustainability.
You might be talking about what you do, or how you do it, but are you talking about how you do it differently?
Earlier this week I was confirming a sponsorship for The Theme Foundry. I was responding to this question over email: “What are the key things you want me to say about your business?”. I gave it some thought and came up with the following:
We’ve been selling WordPress themes since 2008 and have over 30,000 customers. We’re obsessed with building the best WordPress themes, and plan on being around for a long time.
We take pride in the details and value quality over quantity. That’s why we have a small focused collection of WordPress themes. We truly care about building great products.
We’re an exclusive partner with the official hosted WordPress provider, WordPress.com, and we sell our themes on that platform. This means each and every theme goes through a stringent audit process from some of the best themers in the world. You can rest assured our WordPress themes are well coded and secure.
We practice whole team support. You’ll get fast and friendly customer support in our Help Center from the people that actually build our themes. You won’t be interacting with a part time support rep. If you have a question about the new Backbone.js powered fast page loading in Collections, you’ll likely chat with Zack, the guy who actually built it.
After sending the email, I sat back and thought about it for a minute. Wait! Why aren’t we talking about this on our website!? Each one of these unique characteristics is a selling point. It’s a difference maker. It could convince someone our themes are right for them.
Here at The Theme Foundry we sell WordPress templates and host quite a few tutorial videos over in the Help Center. We use the excellent SublimeVideo player to power the videos. Unlike YouTube or Vimeo, SublimeVideo lets us host and serve our own video files and keep them white-label. You add the player via one line of JavaScript and you can write native HTML5 video syntax. SublimeVideo provides a clean and flexible player that automatically picks up the video and also handles playing it via Flash when a browser doesn’t support HTML5.
HTML5 video is great, but to support all the modern browsers (Chrome, Safari, Firefox, Opera, IE9/10), you need to serve two versions of your video files. For Chrome, IE9/10, and Safari, you need MP4 video files, and for Firefox and Opera, you need WebM files.
Most video applications can export videos in the MP4 format, but they usually can’t export in the WebM format. You need a tool to convert those MP4 files to WebM.
Your WordPress website is ready to go, but you really need that special piece of extra functionality your theme isn’t providing. You need to search for a plugin. WordPress plugins add extra functionality and features to your WordPress website.
In search of a plugin, you visit the WordPress plugin repository or try some search terms from your WordPress dashboard. You find results, but how do you know when you’ve found the perfect plugin? Are you even looking in the right place?
Today, we are excited to announce our newest theme, Collections. It’s the perfect home for your videos, photos, and music. Take a look at our demo site, learn more about the theme, or purchase Collections.
World-class design
Designed by the talented Veerle Pieters, Collections is not only a theme, it’s a work of art. Veerle’s vision for the theme shines through every pixel of the design. Quotes are wrapped in circles, audio files are decorated with record sleeves, and details are accentuated with retina ready icons.
Ultrafast browsing
We started completely from scratch, and engineered the theme around an all new lightning fast Backbone powered infrastructure. Website content is instantly pulled in with JavaScript, sidestepping the expensive overhead of a full page load. Browsing feels smooth, snappy, and responsive.
