Can someone please tell me what the Theme designer means?

Without knowing the full context, it appears that this means that the files in your WordPress theme are not compatible with a version the theme designers recently updated to.

You may have updated the theme to the new version, which caused issues. From the reply, it seems that there are CSS issues.

If you’d like to go into detail about what issues you’re having with the theme, I can possibly diagnose further.

After going back and forth with Azione and the web designer who did the CSS customization, it looks like you are right. The update to the theme replaced widgets and so the site no longer worked right. Azione sort of put it back together but not really and then they said ok we are done. I am left with a site that is broken. It does not load right – something is off and I am aware that it has lots of images on the home page but no more than before the update and now it takes forever to load. I would sure appreciate some advice.
Kate

What theme? What’s the site? How much WP, HTML, CSS do you know?

Azione Theme by Obox
mysticctweddingsthe411.com
I can handle WordPress pretty well
Some CSS
Very little HTML

Having said that, I can figure things out and follow instructions. I have had some bad experiences with web designers and I wanted to be able to run a WordPress site by myself. Unfortunately I had Custom CSS done to the site to be able to display the categories in a grid. I updated the site according to Theme directions and the thing fell apart.It is so infuriating because I have been working on the site for two years and now it is broken and I really don’t know what to do. I really wanted to be able to manage it myself. It is a simple idea and frankly I can’t believe someone hasn’t designed a site to manage a video directory. I have spent weeks trying to solve site issues. If I had a good template I would have been much farther along. Azione was the closest I could find but it needed to be tweaked and now I am back to ground zero unless someone can help me recreate the category grids. Thank you for your help.

I can certainly understand it being upsetting and I’m sympathetic to that, but having a regular consistent backup system is pretty basic for any website – sorry, just had to say that.

It’s probably going to be hard for anyone here to know what all might be “wrong” with your site – partly because you are using a commercial and customized theme (they are not supported here), partly because we don’t have access to the backend, and partly because it’s not possible to do extensive custom work for any theme.

So if you want to keep the current theme, you will probably need to hire someone to help you with it – you could post a job here if that’s what you want to do – https://jobs.wordpress.net/

If you want to start fresh, there ARE plenty of themes with a grid layout that could likely be used – you don’t need one that is for a “video directory.”

Echoing WPyogi, for the most part – if you insist on retaining this theme, hiring someone competent is a great idea.

Possible hosting issues aside, there’s quite a long list of issues:

• Over 170 requests (and counting) to various images and scripts, many of which are redundant POST requests
• Load time in minutes (Should ideally be a few seconds at most)
• High amount of images on the homepage without using a lazy-load or caching solution

But you do have some options, if you can’t hire a developer:

Have you considered using a different theme and starting from scratch? That’d be my route for sure. You can try creating a ‘Child Theme’, say, using the free ‘Twenty Ten’ theme as the base theme. (It’s structurally similar to your site)

More on creating Child Themes here.

The Twenty Ten theme

From there, you can easily create grids using a plugin, if you’re not comfortable coding it:

Search for grid-related plugins on www.ads-software.com

After that, I recommend upgrading your hosting, if possible, and/or using caching and/or lazy-loading. More on these items below:

WordPress caching plugins
Lazy loading plugins

So the cat grid problem refered to is the missing or misconfigured shortcode function, resulting in the shortcode texts showing in front.

Those shortcodes are not in post content area, they are in text widgets area, and you are missing CSS for those widgets, that’s why they are all aligned on top of each other.

[jbutton color="gray" size="medium" link="https://example.com/?cat=8"]View More Venues ?[/jbutton]

Looking at the shortcode content, it’s possible that they are from this plugin.
https://www.ads-software.com/plugins/j-shortcodes/

I did not not receive an email so I didn’t think anyone had responded. My apologies for not answering back. Thanks to ramiabraham and paulwpxp for taking the time to look at my site. I really appreciate that. It was broken when I wrote and I knew things were not quite right. I have taken a few lynda.com training courses ha! and I know a tad more than I did. I uploaded the latest version of Azione because it is one of the best for video and I hate to give up. I basically started all over sans designer.
Thanks again everyone for helping.