Choosing a theme for new site

  • Hi all,

    I am wondering if anyone can help me with my query.

    I have lost my job due to COVID-19, and am now thinking about setting up a website that I can hopefully monetize soon. I am a researcher in social science, just fyi. And so, I am interested in setting up my website using WordPress. My website will need the following pages: About, Services, Blog, Ecommerce/Products page, and a member’s area page.

    I have browsed tons of themes and page builders so far, including Gutenberg, Divi, Astra, Elementor, Kadence etc. However, I am worried that I will be locked into one theme, if and when I decide to switch. In a demo site, I tried to change my theme from Astra to Kadence and vice versa, and it completely stuffed up my demo site. I have previously tried Gutenberg editor, but it seems extremely basic.

    Is there any way I can design a simple but elegant looking website without losing my content? I just want to be able to change the look and some features of my site (e.g., headers and footers), without having to fix a botched-up site after the change. I also don’t want to be locked into one theme.

    Can anyone suggest how should I best proceed with building the site?

    Thanks heaps!

    Roy

    • This topic was modified 4 years, 4 months ago by Jan Dembowski. Reason: Moved to Fixing WordPress, this is not an Everything else WordPress topic
Viewing 3 replies - 1 through 3 (of 3 total)

  • It doesn’t really work that way.
    The content from your site gets rendered to the browser based on the look and feel and design and style of the theme. The content layer, and the theme layer are separated entities.

    My first question would be why the hesitation about “being locked into a theme”?
    Are you expecting to change the theme with frequency ?
    What you really want is a theme that you can easily configure and modify. Divi and Elementor and Beaver Builder make theme modifications as painless as possible for the non-technical. My recommendation is to stop wasting time cycling through themes, and just pick one and go it.
    This is a good place to get yourself going :
    https://elementor.com/getting-started/

    Thread Starter droyed

    (@droyed)

    Thank you @corrinarusso for your comments. So you’re saying that I will not lose my content then?

    You are right – I should pick and theme and go for it. The reason I’m a bit worried about being locked into a theme is because I want to develop the website as I go (I guess most people do it that way anyway). I’m not sure if these theme builders will give me that option to expand and scale up at a later stage.

    So for instance, I want to plan this as:

    Stage 1: Home, About, Services, Contact, and Blog – (I will have this for now)

    Stage 2: I will gradually like to create an ecommerce page and a member’s area.

    And so, I’m not sure if I should pick a theme now that already has all of these (Stage 1+2) integrated (like Astra) or build Stage 1 with a page builder (like Elementor) for now and then look at seperate plugins at a later stage for ecommerce and member’s area. What would you suggest?

    The more I research this on the internet the more confusing it gets. I am having the same issue with hosting for instance. Some reviewers (e.g., youtube) suggest that BlueHost is an excellent company because they are recommended by WordPress, but then there are others who say that it is owned by EIG which has a bad reputation. I have found the same for DreamHost customer support. So I don’t know if any of the recommended hosts are good. And finally, which hosting provider should I go with….

    > So you’re saying that I will not lose my content then?

    No content is lost when you apply a new theme to your site.

    Astra and OceanWP are excellent examples of themes with scale. You do not need to implement everything at once. The theme will accommodate your styles to different plugins – such as eCommerce or a Members Area.

    BlueHost is painful.
    I’ve been using Siteground for years, and their support is first rate.
    imo, the support makes or breaks a good host.

Viewing 3 replies - 1 through 3 (of 3 total)
  • The topic ‘Choosing a theme for new site’ is closed to new replies.