Guest article provided by: mrwpress.com
Among other advice for new business owners, it’s important to know that one of the most cost-effective ways to spin up a new website is by purchasing a pre-built WordPress theme. Several sites have large libraries of website designs with dummy content ready to be imported into your fresh website. This gives you an amazing starting point, with pages and menus and more included in the package.
Add Your Own Brand Identity
Pre-built themes come with a placeholder for everything, including the site name and important branding elements like the logo. The first step in making this content your own is to change these identifying elements. Usually, you’ll find these in your WordPress dashboard by heading to Appearance > Customize > Site Identity, though some themes move these settings into their own theme settings. From here, you can change those crucial identifying elements to reflect your business!
Replace the Placeholder Text
Just like the identifying elements, these pre-built themes load in placeholder text into all of the beautifully-designed sections. Sometimes the designers will go an extra step and replace the “lorem ipsum” Latin with vague content related to the industry the theme is intended for, but it still won’t do you or any site visitors much good for real information. Take that placeholder text, and replace it with context-appropriate text about your own business, services or products, mission, team, and more.
Source Fresh Imagery
This step isn’t always necessary: sometimes the theme designers pick some perfect images! They’ve usually taken the time to choose some nice stock images related to the intended use of their theme. But a personalized touch beats out stock images every time. Adding your own pictures is a great way to make the site your own, matching the unique visual style of your business instead of boilerplate placeholder images.
Update the colors and other themes
Pre-built themes provide a great general design for a variety of sites, but that doesn’t mean the purchased design has to be the final destination. The vast majority of these themes come with a plethora of options that allow you to add a personalized touch to the pre-packaged design. The color settings can have an amazing impact in making the site feel unique, especially when they match the logo or brand colors of the rest of your business.
There are plenty of other options to customize the site as well. The text font face is another great way to make your site distinct from other sites using the same theme. Google has a wide variety of options to choose from for free, too! Depending on the theme, you may also find totally different options for the header and footer layout.
For the more tech-savvy, there’s also always a place to add your own custom CSS styling code, whether directly in the theme or through Appearance > Customize > Custom CSS.
Reogranize existing sections
Just like with the colors and other settings, you’re not locked into the exact layout the pre-built theme comes with. Many pre-built themes these days come with a visual page builder built in, specifically so customers can modify the site and mold it to their needs. If this is the case, feel free to drag sections around, and reorganize to your hearts content!
But even without a visual page builder, you’re not stuck. WordPress has a concept called child themes. This is a theme based off of an existing “parent” theme, in this case the pre-built theme you purchased. The child theme will pull everything it can from the parent theme – except for what you specify should be different! You can load in your own templates, styles, and even totally custom functions to modify the out-of-the-box solution to fit your own business.
Expand beyond the pre-built
More than just reorganizing like we mentioned above, you can add totally new sections to your site as well! Maybe your business has a unique aspect that a typical site design wouldn’t cover. With the plethora of theme settings already configured, the overall look and style of the site will apply to any new sections you create as well. Whether this is through an included page builder or manual code in a template, don’t hesitate to add your own sections if your business demands it!
Additionally, one of the reasons WordPress is so popular is because there’s a wide variety of plugins you can add. Is the theme you purchased missing a crucial functionality, like an appointment calendar or eCommerce store? Browse the WordPress plugin repository and beyond to find an easy solution for that gap. Not finding what you need? Consider a totally custom plugin to meet your exact needs!
Start up a blog
One of the absolute best ways to start growing your business and its search engine presence is by starting to write longform content like blog posts. These give you an opportunity to offer your unique perspective into your business and industry, and increase your visibility through search engines and social media with every addition. This is also a great way to start generating backlinks, another crucial SEO metric.
Ready to start your next project? Don’t hestiate to reach out to us today and ask about our services! We can get you started with web development, or even go back to basics and work on your underlying brand to make sure it’s ready to turn into a top-notch website.
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