Best WordPress Theme for Your Business: Interview with @Craylor Made
Hello everyone, I hope you are doing great. Today we are joined by Christian Taylor who is an entrepreneur drummer and creator of the YouTube channel Trailermaid where he makes video tutorials on how to create websites, getting online and building your brand. Today alongside with him we are going to discuss a very important topic in WordPress which is where to find and how to select the perfect theme for your business. Enjoy the video and don't forget to subscribe. This video was brought to you by 10Web an automated WordPress platform designed for agencies. Automate hosting,
speed optimization, migration, site building and management and skyrocket your agency growth. Sign up for a 14-day free trial and experience through automation. Hey Christian, thank you so much for accepting our invitation. Yeah thanks for having me. I was really glad that you reached out and I'm excited to be here. So before going to the main topic of our discussion and talking about WordPress themes I would like to ask you to tell us a bit more about like your personal history with WordPress. I know that you started your first business when you were 13 and did you... what was it first of all? And did you use WordPress back then? Yeah so my first
business was actually selling Minecraft servers or renting them I guess, kind of, like web hosting but for Minecraft servers and I was just renting dedicated servers from a host and, you know, had the software on there to kind of split the server up into different Minecraft servers for people and I mostly started out using static HTML templates so I would just kind of edit the HTML myself and have it on a web hosting account but I did start messing around with WordPress around that time and that's definitely what got me interested was just looking for a better website builder rather than having to edit all the code, the HTML code by hand. Okay, and can you also tell us like what was the very first website you built with WordPress? So, I might, I believe, if I remember correctly my first WordPress website was for my own personal Minecraft server. I had, I was trying to promote it and I maybe had like some sort of donation plugging on there that was a big thing back in the day on minecraft where people could donate to get perks in the game and I may have had like a blog or like an events page I think, like certain, you know, upcoming events on the server that you can join but from what I remember that was my first WordPress site. Okay perfect i i really love when people like make their passions or something they like it and they make it into business so it was great to hear your story yeah definitely it's it's been a journey for sure so uh when i was building my very first wordpress website and it was actually a gaming website as well it was about for posting news about esports so i was very very confused i had no idea how to select the theme for for my website should i like think about what's more important for me right now or should i look into the future and find a theme that will incorporate all of those features i might need in future so should i pay for it or no so can you guide us like through the whole process and what are some criterias when selecting wordpress themes yeah definitely so first we'll kind of touch on the the paid themes and we'll get into paid versus free in a minute but if you are looking at a paid theme i first like to tell people you know what what's the developer reputation like if you're looking at a theme say on themeforest does the developer have good reviews do they have a lot of sales on that theme what are the comments saying maybe you can look on youtube or google and search for the theme and see if anyone's got any independent reviews because there's a lot of paid and free themes out there that are just very low quality code and a low quality back end you're going to be frustrated if you don't really look into the developer's reputation and make sure that they make high quality stuff so that would be the first one um the the second thing would be what page builder does it use and knowing if there's one you prefer such as wp bakery or elementor sometimes themes will support both but oftentimes i find that they include one or the other so if you tend to prefer elementor or wp bakery i think it's good to find a theme that fits that page builder you're used to because i i find that i prefer wp bakery and so when i look for a theme that's typically a requirement is i want it to include that support that so i can feel at home with the editing side of it and there you know there's a lot of factors i've got here how does the theme scale on mobile i think a lot of us will look on desktop and say oh this theme demo looks awesome and ninety percent of the time they look awesome on mobile too but that's definitely a factor in our mobile first internet too make sure you pull out your phone load the demo there see how does the scale does this look good does anything look funky when it's squished down to a phone screen that's important um how do you like the demo options available you know sometimes i will buy a theme when i don't love the demo options because i can see the bigger picture of okay i like the buttons i like the styling i just don't like how they have these demo pages arranged and you can certainly do that if you're comfortable with wordpress but i think for a lot of us we're looking for can i just import one of the demo sites as a base and just edit it from there i think that's what a lot of wordpress builders do including myself in some scenarios so you know click through the different demo pages a lot of themes will have multiple different demos almost like different sets of websites that you can import see if there's one that stands out to you another factor would be how long is the customer support valid on themeforest by default that would be six months and then you have the option to extend it or you know if you're buying it from an independent site or somewhere else it's important to know you know do i have to renew my support is it valid for the lifetime of the theme is there any customer support that's certainly a factor and the last one i have here is what is the support like for essential plugins for your needs so if you're doing an e-commerce store you're probably using woocommerce does the theme support woocommerce is it optimized for it you know if you don't care about woocommerce that's that's fine you don't have to worry about that but definitely no you know if you're using like bb press the forum plug-in how does the theme run on that so those are i know there's a lot there but those are some of the important factors i've got for choosing a paid wordpress theme perfect thank you for those points and you actually mentioned customer support and i wanted to touch up to this point as well so i've also seen that some websites that sell themes uh do not have customer support included so would you recommend everyone to like absolutely get at least the minimum packages for customer support yeah so i i would say generally i would just pick a different theme that's got support included i mean you'll have to gauge you know how much do you like this theme what does it cost is it does it make sense to you but generally speaking i kind of would expect that a paid theme i purchased would have some sort of support included so you know i guess if if you're in that scenario and you're like this is definitely the theme i'm gonna buy should i buy support or not i would probably hold off and just buy support later if you can you know if it's something where you have to buy it up front with the theme then maybe you know it i guess you kind of know where you're at with wordpress and your skill level sometimes even the most skilled wordpress developers could use some support from the theme developer because there's something that just doesn't make sense or is a little you know unconventional and the theme developer knows their theme inside and out but man that's that's a hard question i think it's it's really just a case-by-case basis got it so yeah it depends basically on yourself and your wordpress knowledge um actually when you were showing this uh another thing came to my mind and i've seen recently that many wordpress theme developers have also discord servers which if you guys listening as there don't know is a platform or an application for creating communities and some theme developers have wordpress servers where you can go and ask questions to other people who have bought the same theme and there have been a couple of times when it was much faster than waiting for the customer support from the developers themselves yeah oh totally and you know another factor i like to point out is if you're really picking your theme based on developer reputation and a credible theme that a lot of users are using then there's probably some sort of community or forum site out there that you can go to and talk to other users of that theme and that's similar to the discord server like you mentioned i'm a big proponent of finding a theme that's got support it's got people backing it you know it's it's not just some random theme you found on google but it's like a i guess you could call it like a super theme examples of this would be like divi aveda um there's there's several other ones on theme forest but you know big credible themes that have been out there for many years they've got a lot of sales and a lot of people using it i think that's going to go hand in hand with the customer support experience you get okay yeah got it so um and just to clarify again you are recommending to pay for premium themes right instead of getting the free ones generally yes so what i find is if you're doing a blog don't overlook the free included wordpress themes this would be like 2021 2020 you know all those themes that come with wordpress i like those because they're official you know they're they're vetted by the wordpress team they're high quality they're not super advanced and they're not super flashy so i would not use that if you're trying to do a corporate landing page or a sales page or like hey this is my local business i'd probably shy away from that and get a premium theme but if you are just doing a blog and you're starting with a low budget then i would not overlook those free themes i think they're actually pretty nice for blogs that are starting out and the other thing would be e-commerce if you're using woocommerce i tend to favor their storefront theme which is free as a base they do have like styling packs for that that you can pay for and kind of change up the look but i like storefront because it's free and once again it's an official theme so you know it's gonna work with woocommerce it's gonna update with all the woocommerce updates and not get broken and i get nervous about third-party themes and woocommerce sometimes because you never know if you update the woocommerce plugin is it going to take out your store and all of a sudden things are broken so it's it's honestly very nice that those are two options that are totally free and they're kind of endorsed by wordpress but yeah for anything else if you're like a corporation or local business or you know you're doing like a portfolio or like a personal almost like a resume type about me website generally i would say it's worth it to buy a premium theme and one thing to look out for is there's a lot of freemium themes out there meaning they have a free version but they also have a pro version i typically recommend staying away from those because i find that you start building your site on the free theme but there's all these limitations and you just end up getting frustrated and given and by the pro upgrade it's kind of like they they plan for you to do that all along and usually the pro versions of those themes end up costing more than just buying a paid theme to begin with so i would definitely be cautious about other free themes out there that aren't the official wordpress ones okay the the this is actually all of those are great things to know when selecting the theme and i'm sure everyone who just heard you will be more aware of freemium themes so you also mentioned three different categories actually so you mentioned e-commerce you also talked about blogs and for example that people can use free themes for blogs and also you said that for corporate or for like flash landing pages uh people can get themes so we have three categories here ecommerce blogs and landing pages are there any differences uh for like selecting themes or like i don't know in case of e-commerce i should put more attention to these features and in case of landing page i should put more attention to the other one um so what how would you recommend people to look into that depending on their business yeah so if you're doing a landing page i would say the page builder and the demo content is super important because you're going to be doing a lot of drag and drop you know arranging your hero section and maybe you've got like a section with some icons and text and animations so i would say that is very important for landing pages it goes back to what i said earlier do you prefer wp bakery do you prefer elementor if you don't know that's okay you can do some exploring and experiment with different page builders and options but if you know what you want make sure you pay close attention to that and really vision the site you know look through the demos and say can i see my company logo here can i see this being my landing page and the caveat to that is steam developers tend to kind of stuff their demos full of like every possible thing the theme could do and every animation so sometimes the demos can be a little overwhelming a little bit busy because they're trying to fit in every single thing that it could do but definitely pay attention to that for a landing page make sure that it's something that would work you know if you're doing a blog i don't want to say that the page builder is not important because it could be useful if you're doing an about page or a contact page but i tend to think it's less important so you know if you've got a blog and maybe you prefer wp bakery but there's an elementor theme that you really love and you think it's perfect for your blog you like the styling maybe it's okay to do that because you're mainly going to be creating blog posts which is kind of the standard wordpress gutenberg ui that everyone knows and loves and you're going to be messing with the actual pages a lot less and for e-commerce i would say it's all about finding support for woocommerce again like i'm a little bit weary of third-party themes for woocommerce but i know a lot of people use them and they love them so just make sure it supports woocommerce make sure it's a credible theme developer you know you really got to make sure that they're going to update the theme in a timely manner with woocommerce because uh sometimes if you've used woocommerce you know when they put out an update to woocommerce they'll say something about like hey the the theme doesn't support it yet or make sure that this steam supports the update so i would say those are the different things to pay attention to in each category okay perfect thanks for clarifying everything for each of those categories and what are like the best sources for finding those things so there's three that i personally like and that would be wordpress.org for free themes again you've got to be careful with the free themes but it is a good place to look and see what some of the free themes are and they may even have paid themes i'm not too sure on that but that's always a place you can start i personally really like themeforest for paid themes there's also elegant themes they are the developers behind divi i think that's really their only wordpress theme at this point but it's sold directly on their website which is elegant themes it's not sold on themeforest or any other marketplace but those would be the three for me wordpress.org theme forest elegant themes there may be some
other great marketplaces out there those are just the three that i've known and have stuck to over the years so another important aspect of websites is the speed so we are browsing through all those three sources that you mentioned we saw a theme that we liked so uh what are the best ways of understanding like whether this website has good speed or it will like drop our seo rankings or just affect negatively the overall experience for our website visitors yeah so this is a tough one you know i mean there's there's tools out there like the google page speed insight that you can run on the demo so that will tell you stuff like the the test time on the first meaningful paint it's like a term for how fast does the content load for the user to read so google's got all sorts of algorithms and tests behind it but you can try the pagespeed insight tool from google just put in the demo theme url that the developer has listed see what score it gives and there's other tools out there if you google just free online tools where you can paste the the demo site and it'll check it but you know there's a lot of factors to it that both the theme developer and you could potentially skew which way those results go i've got here like the hosting and the caching that you're using that can make a big difference on that score you know whether the code is minified whether your images are optimized and compressed and those are all things that the theme developer may or may not be doing or things that you may or may not be doing so i've had cases where you know i check a theme's score on page insight and i'm like oh this is this is speedy this is great then once i get it set up on my site it's a lot slower and it's like well you know i don't know how the theme developer did their optimization how did they compress their images down what sort of caching plug-in are they using so you know there's other things you can do like the non-scientific real world test of just loading it uploading the demo and saying does this feel slow does this compare with facebook and twitter which probably not because they've got a ton of money into optimization and stuff but that's a really really complex question with a lot of caveats to it i mean i do think it's smart to check it against page speed insights absolutely i do that when i'm looking for a theme but i don't think it's the whole story and i think that it really could go either way there's cases where you could improve that score on your own from the demo by doing your own optimizations or there's cases that the developer may have such great optimizations that you don't know exactly what they were doing and you kind of struggle to meet that score on your own website uh the advice of like checking the demo or using google pageviet score is like it's a life hack i think i for example i never stopped of doing that and from now on i will definitely do it do it and uh and i absolutely agree with you that hosting for example is also very very important for the website speed and just teams cannot help or a perfectly optimized theme can run very very poorly on a bad hosting so i would also like to talk to you about plugins and how they work with themes like do you have any bad experiences where for example you have installed a plugin on your website and it completely ruined your your website and all your previous work i definitely have so i had a theme where the blog page well i guess this is kind of your question in reverse but the blog post page would not work unless you had woocommerce installed which i thought was super strange i was not interested in making my website a store i didn't want woocommerce i found that it was slowing the whole site down you know if you if if your store is ecommerce and you need woocommerce that's perfectly fine but i didn't need woocommerce slowing my site down when i'm not going to use it but the whole theme would break if woocommerce wasn't installed or the blog post page would so that was very strange and i'm trying to think of other instances i don't know that i've ever installed a plug-in and had it break a theme um it's certainly possible i have seen cases of it happening to people i don't know that that's ever happened to me i have had or i i have had instances where third-party plug-ins end up causing like a security hole in the site and it gets hacked but that's not really related to the theme that's more kind of an issue with the plug-in itself but yeah you do definitely have to be careful with the plug-ins you choose to use with your site yeah and always do backups before doing any significant changes just in case yeah i'm a huge fan of automatic daily backups or weekly backups you know just something where you don't have to remember every time you edit it to go and make a backup first because i don't remember i just lean on automatic backups and if something gets messed up i just go click restore get the midnight backup and i'm back where i started yeah i agree with you and that's actually one of uh very important features that we have at the 10 web to help our clients never to lose anything we also always automatically back up their website depending on their preference like the data schedules and uh so wordpress is developing and it's developing quite quickly and so are themes uh what do you think will be the industry of teams going into 2021 oh man i love this question so i think in 2021 and beyond we're gonna see a lot more block-based themes so these would be themes that work with gutenberg natively and the new full-site editing that's coming to wordpress that's kind of been in beta-ish for about the past year or so and that's going to be where you can actually use blocks so kind of like there's blocks in gutenberg you'll be able to use that on things like the header the footer the sidebar and have an entirely new way to edit your wordpress website so i think in 2021 we're going to see more wordpress themes come out that are steering towards a gutenberg and block based editor where it's going to start to use the new included wordpress editor and start to phase out the third party page builders i certainly don't think they're dead you know if you like wp bakery or elementor or divi they've got their own page builder i don't think those are dead i think they're going to be around for many years to come and i think there's going to be pros and cons to each solution but i do think we're going to see more theme developers embracing the built-in page builder which would be gutenberg for now or whatever it becomes in the future and the whole block system of wordpress and maybe getting away from some of those third-party page builders which i am really excited about because i think that the next big phase of wordpress is going to be creating a more uniform solution for everyone so wordpress is just wordpress and people know hey i can buy this theme it's going to be edited the same exact way that this other theme is going to be edited and that's using the default wordpress tools maybe we can kind of get away from all the third-party plugins that add-on and add-on and add-on to wordpress and change the panel and sometimes it can be confusing you know just being like wait well in this theme i do this to edit the header and in this theme i have to go here which is different so i really hope that we see more consistency in wordpress in 2021 so yeah as you know we have recently launched uh our ai builder which helps companies to recreate websites and um create themes out of different websites which then can can later be edited using 10 web editor that is based on elementor so what do you think about this approach and like overall the use of ai going into the future yeah so i think it's pretty neat i did have a chance to mess around with the ai builder and kind of see how it would clone another website i think it's kind of fun to be able to use a website for inspiration and then edit it and make it your own from there so i really like that and you know i think that ai will be used in the future to help people create more basic websites wix has already done this with wix adi you can kind of go on there and say here's my business name here's my color scheme and they'll assemble like different sites that you could pick from as a base i certainly don't think that ai is going to replace the need for a designer you know if you really really want a unique great looking in-depth website i think there's no substitute for a human who's you know they've got the graphic eye and they're saying hey let's do this here and this here but i do think that ai is going to give people a starting point and it's going to be where if you want a basic blog or a basic landing page for your business in the future you can almost just fill out a form and say here's my business name here's my logo it can pull colors from your logo and you know here's a little piece of text about my business and it could suggest maybe themes to you or maybe like within a theme it could almost like build a page for you and say hey what do you think about this what do you think about this and it could give you inspiration to take that and craft it into your website so i think there's a big future for ai and web design you know we absolutely agree with you and our goal as a company is also to help uh developers agencies freelancers everyone to just make their work quicker and it's not gonna replace uh it people in any ways it it's just ai is definitely going to help all of those people with website building yeah definitely i totally agree and uh actually to to end this interview i've prepared some blitz questions that i would love to ask you just tell me when you are ready all right let's go for it okay um i do work do you prefer working on a hardware or software business um i'd say software and that would be because the software is always moving you know there's new exciting stuff and since i do youtube i you know i love talking about software more than hardware because it's easier to produce that content it's just you know you don't have to take the b-roll shots of the physical hardware and get the lighting just right for that so i definitely prefer software businesses what is more important for you when learning a new skill theory or practice practice for sure 100 i think that theory is great and there's a lot of value in knowing it but at the end of the day you have to figure out what works for you when you're doing the skill and i'm kind of a big proponent of just jump in and try it and learn as you go so uh you are one of those people who keeps tutorials in the beginning yeah for sure i absolutely do so do you prefer watching videos or listening to podcasts oh man i like both for different reasons if i had to pick watching videos i'm definitely a visual learner again that's another reason i love doing youtube because that's how i connect best with content but podcasts are nice for driving though or you know at night when i'm falling asleep i definitely listen to podcasts which is kind of funny because i fall asleep halfway through and miss it but that's kind of the point when i'm listening to it at night but yeah video for sure and what is more interesting for you to do creating websites or working on marketing slash branding you know i would say working on marketing and branding because there's a lot of that kind of built into creating a website so if we can kind of separate and be like creating the website it's the technical side of dragging the elements on the page and working on the different sections and marketing would be more hey what's the logo going on that page what is the page going to say that's going to speak to the potential customer and you know what are we going to do for this ad campaign what is this magazine slot going to look like i definitely prefer working on the branding and the marketing side of things and the last question who do you think is a better drummer john bonham or anyone else oh man oh that's a blindsided question ah i don't know much about john i feel like i'm totally embarrassing myself here but because if i pick a side there's gonna be people that are like ah about either side but just because i don't really know his drumming style which i may get flamed for in the comments that's fine and give you permission to do that but i would say anyone else simply because i'm not familiar with him but you guys can roast me in the comments it's totally fine or we can just cut this question either one yeah actually john bonham is the drummer of led zeppelin okay all right yeah i'm i'm not really much into classic rock or the more old school bands which i so whenever people ask me questions like that i never know what to say because i'm like oh i don't want to sound dumb but if i don't acknowledge this drummer who's clearly like famous and a legend to some people then i'm just going to get attacked for like what how could you not know this person like i always say that i don't really love the beatles that's like a a big friction point where people will come at me like what the beatles are untouchable but anyway no one's gonna blame you here and uh you don't have to be you don't have to know all the drummers to be a good one yourself um so this was all from me and thank you so much for accepting invitation for being here and for uh giving this your time and sharing all this valuable knowledge with us uh it was really great i personally learned a lot i'm sure everyone did so thank you once again so much for being here yeah thanks for having me it was a pleasure to uh do this interview thank you have a nice day goodbye you too bye-bye this video was brought to you by ten web an automated wordpress platform designed for agencies automate hosting speed optimization migration site building and management and skyrocket your agency growth sign up for a 14 day free trial and experience through 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2021-04-23 23:43
