Wordpress themes are everywhere, there are so many choices available today including those as part of frameworks as well as stand-alones.They make life easy and you can save a lot of time and money.But should you use them? Would you be better served by getting a well optimised custom design? We discuss your options in today's episode.

https://youtu.be/xy0eDdaRClQResources for this Episode

Darryl: Hi I'm Daryl King and my co-host Ed Pelgen we're a couple of old internet guides have been running our online agencies for over 20 years we get together weekly to talk about all the things online especially for small and medium business owners who still refer through their bloody website each week we look at tackling a range of online issues and put them in plain language so anyone can understand how to make the websites work better for their businesses Ed this is episode 25 we're gonna touch on a whole lot of WordPress theme issues I believe how are you?

Edmund: Very good and yourself Darryl?

Darryl: yeah excellent mate excellent I reckon I reckon we should I want you to tell our audience some of the experiences you have with WordPress you've been hacking WordPress sites for 20 odd years or not quite that long hasn't always been around but and you and I chat sometimes when you have frustrations or things that have come

Edmund: Yeah

Darryl: along and over the last few years I've shake your view on that but I think you have insight probably quite similar to a lot of the people in the audience that are building sites on their own got people building them for them putting a lot of trust in the end result that they get and maybe you might have some insight how how do you go about handling making your WordPress look pretty

Edmund: absolutely so my I guess my experience with WordPress is similar to a lot of other people who wanna get actively involved in building their sites right many years ago when I was a small business owner just starting out and I wanted to build a website I didn't have the budget to pay an expensive web developer or agency to build it for me and but I also had an interest in learning how to use it and you know WordPress was the choice the CMS the content management system of choice for startup type businesses and small businesses entrepreneurs and so I got into WordPress that way and the challenge was like everyone you wanted to make your website your business look good you wanted it to function well and you wanted it to make you look professional because there are a million in one really crappy looking WordPress websites out there and so my experience was you know basically because I don't have a design bone in my body but I know what I like led me to WordPress themes to to get the look and feel I guess that I was after to make me look bigger and better than I was I suppose and that's where it started

Darryl: and going beyond that pathway and then look the environment has changed from the early days of WordPress to where we are now you know from a blogging platform we kind of skinned it and most people use the default to what we have now which is proper content management systems and I think with Gutenburg coming you know like in page editing the whole lot so it's changed a lot but what were the or what problems have you come across when you you know it's install a theme and then you didn't like it after a while change or what but but what things in general what problems have you come across with with getting a theme

Edmund: well I mean I guess the first thing was that I would install a theme and back in the early days getting the configuring the theme was really challenging right back in the early days I don't think there were any default rules about how to do it and each developer had their own style or their own approach to building out the the content elements on the page and so as a business owner and I'm still new to this it was frustrating right some of the instructions weren't as good as th...