Our WordPress Themes Training Course shows you how WordPress themes work, how to find great themes for your website, and how to build you own!
In this course we explore the wonderful world of WordPress themes, and how easy it is to get a great looking website built in record time using free themes and premium themes.
We also look at the pros and cons of using WordPress themes, and what to do when a complex project requires a lot of theme customisation. We also take a look at the latest generation of theme builders, providing you with a hands-on tour of the best theme builders currently available.
There are thousands of free themes available for you to use on your WordPress site, and what's more, they are easy to find, download and activate as well. Simply by visiting Appearance > Themes and clicking Add New you are presented with a selection from WordPress' own library of over 4000 themes! Many of these free themes are excellent, and have become extremely popular over the years with webmasters and designers alike. You can also browse themes by latest, favourites, and there's also a feature filter too, within which you can filter themes by subject, features and layout.
So what's the catch you might ask? Well oftentimes, you will find that themes are limited in certain ways, most usually by the degree of customisation that you can apply to them. A themes homepage design might look great, but when you start developing your other pages, you might find the theme lacking. Most theme developers offer free themes in the hope that you will upgrade to using their premium themes, to which of course a cost is applicable. In actual fact, it's a sensible business model, and we ourselves have bought many premium themes off the back of using a developers free theme, having found it to be just what we were looking for on a particular project. However, some free themes often lack in other respects, and this can cause problems later on down the line. In our WordPress themes training course, we explore all of the pros and cons of using free themes, including when (and when not) to use them.
As mentioned, premium themes usually have a cost attached to them, often in the region of $50-80 per theme, although this cost is often more than worth the expense in time saved. Premium themes usually come ready-made for a specific purpose (e.g. Travel Agent, Construction Company etc), with lots of functionality built in. In addition, theme developers often integrate popular plugins into their themes, with all of the design elements taken care of, saving you hours of customisation time, and offering powerful functionality from the start. We have often found premium themes that are (almost) perfect for our specific clients needs, especially when browsing the excellent website Themeforest, which is probably the ultimate theme directory website in existence.
So again, is that all there is to it? Well, the answer here would be yes and no. Most premium themes are regularly updated, and this update process can sometimes have unwanted knock-on effects to any theme customisation's you may have applied, or additional plugins you may have added to the website. Whilst it is usually sensible to store your theme customisation's into what is called a child theme, this isn't always practical. On other occasions, your client would perhaps rather not pay a yearly fee to keep their theme current and up-to-date (annual renewals are often the deal with premium themes). Or alternatively, it may simply prove to be impractical to attempt to customise a complex theme that isn't quite what you are looking for. That's where theme builders come in.
Theme builders allow you to design your websites theme as you like, with tools and code blocks ready-made to drop into your WordPress templates as you see fit. Currently, the favourites in this field are Oxygen and Elementor, with Divi bringing up the rear. Our personal favourite is Oxygen, which costs £99 as a one-off fee, including a lifetime license with unlimited updates! In this online class, we give you a full tour of the power of Oxygen to build you theme. We also offer a dedicated Oxygen Builder Training Course if you wish to delve deeper into the power of using Oxygen to build your WordPress websites.
