Themes are a great way to add customization to your site. Inexperienced users do not really have to have much skills or background to install a theme and make some basic customizations to a theme. More experienced users can either create their own theme or use an existing theme and springboard from that and develop their own creations.
The most important thing to consider when selecting a theme is to determine the purpose of your site and your audience. Themes are often designed and created for a particular audience and purpose of the. Because Hawaii Beach Guide is a travel site – it was important to find a theme that helped showcase the beauty of the islands but with the ability to provide added functionality in terms of responsive layout and ease of customizations. Again, like plugins, I used the internet to find ideas of what themes I wanted to consider and review. The theme had to be available in the WordPress directory and had to be free, and honestly I reviewed and tried out several before I decided on my final contenders.
I decided to use Travel Ultimate by Theme Palace because it checked off most of the things I was looking for in a theme:
- The theme was free and available in the WordPress directory (there is a pro version available for a cost).
- It had a lot of customizations available and was designed for a responsive layout.
- I loved how the theme looked and thought the design and features (including the navigation and header elements) were very appropriate for a travel site like Hawaii Beach Guide.
- For the most part, the theme was easy to work with although I did struggle at times to find solutions to get it to look like I wanted (or at least close).
One of the advantages of the theme was that it was geared to wards the travel industry. So the ability to add images and incorporate them was very useful. I did struggle in that the theme was geared to a business travel site – so I had to adjust or not use some of the features that were included – so as making travel arrangements. But having features like testimonials came in handy as I was able to use that on both the About Us page and the Contact Us page.
I was able to make some customizations (in addition to the easy ones included in the appearances panel), but the main struggle I had/have was the inability to adjust the link colors appropriately. By default, they are white – which works well on the top navigation but not as much on a light color background such as this post. To work around that – each time I have a link, I need to edit the block’s custom CSS which doesn’t always work as well as I am sure it’s intended. It usually take a few tries to get the custom CSS to stick (for example, the selector will usually get change to null for some reason). In some cases, I had to use inline CSS to adjust the color of the link (that’s why some do not have a hover color). I also had some struggles with the store pages for some reason – for example, the image thumbnails will not show on the product pages. But I was able to resolve most of the issues by rethinking my design and adding some custom CSS as needed. But other than that and a few other challenges, I thought the theme was relatively easy to work with and I am very pleased with the end result. In the future, I would like to work on customizing the Store page more and think that with enough time and practice, that could really work well.