Clifton Hatfield breaks down WordPress Themes: - Free - Premium - Freemium and even gets into the functions.php file / child-themes / responsive design.

1. WordPress Themes
underlying, unifying design for a blog

2. My Background
● Father
● Husband
● Developer
● Ninja
● Creating themes & plugins for past five years
● Built hundreds of blogs
● Plugins: thousands of downloads worldwide

3. What is a theme?!
A WordPress Theme is a collection of files that
work together to produce a graphical interface
with an underlying, unifying design for a blog.
Huh? In English...
● Gives your blog its appearance
● What visitors see
● Graphics & Colors
● Typography
● Responsiveness & Awesomeness

4. "Simplicity is the ultimate
sophistication."
...and sometimes not so awesome.

5. Not All Themes Are Created Equal
Free Themes Premium Themes
Freemium Themes

6. Free Themes
● Cost: Free
● Lack flexibility & customization
● Less features
● Plain appearance
● Great for content delivery
● Straight to the point
● Unsupported or slow development
● Often outdated

7. Premium Themes
● Cost: Paid....but sometimes free!
● More options & flexibility
● Beautiful appearance
● Custom layouts
● Supported & maintained
● Large communities
● Customize to fit your needs & deep desires

8. Freemium Themes
● Cost: Free...with option to pay
● Same as Premium Theme
Option to pay?! what?!
Pay to remove footer links, ads, or acquire
enhanced features.

9. GPL Licensing & Open Source
● Open source means free, right?! Yes & No!
● Free as in freedom. Not free like those
cheese samples you swipe at the grocery
store.
● GPL is the freedom to receive & change the
source code.
● All WordPress software should be covered
under GPL or similar licensing. (themes &
plugins)

10. Customizing Your Theme
● Never ever..ever edit the core files of
WordPress...ever.
● Lose your changes during an update
● Bad practice
● Never had reason to do it..ever.

11. How to easily customize a theme
● Go Premium!
● Premium themes have user friendly options
● Look for a demo to check out its options
● Does it fit your needs?

12. For the Hardcore Customizing
● Be a ninja
● All WP themes should be GPL (look for this)
● Customizing Theme core files is bad practice
● Utilize the functions.php file

13. More Hardcore Customizing
The functions.php file
● /wp-content/themes/themename/functions.php
● Acts much like a plugin
● Change default behaviors of your theme or WordPress
● Use WP hooks, actions, and filters
● Turn on theme support for post thumbnails, menu, etc
● Several blocks of code to expand the functionality of the
active theme.

14. Even More Hardcode Customizing
Child Theme
● Dependant on a parent theme (premium)
● Files in Child Theme override parent theme files
● functions.php in child can replace parent functions
● Unique headers in style.css to identify child & parent
● /wp-content/themes/childthemename/

15. Hardcore Customizing Continues
Want to add a subscription box to your theme's homepage?
● Create a duplicate of the parent theme's index.php file
● Place duplicate file in child theme directory
● Customize duplicate index.php file in child theme
● Active the child theme
● The duplicate index.php will override the parent's index.
php

16. Why go through the trouble?
GPL gives us the freedom to copy and improve
already written code. Awesome! But it's not
always a good idea.
● Child themes protect changes from the update monster.
● When the parent theme is updated, the child theme isn't.
● Our changes may not be compatible with the recent
updates but at least you didn't lose all your work.
So remember, think twice before customizing core theme files,
create a child theme, and only you can prevent forest fires.

17. Responsiveness & Awesomeness
"Big things come in small packages"
Mobile devices have never been so popular
● Fast web browsing
● Powerful processors
● High screen resolutions
● Broad Demographics
● On-the-go

18. Responsive Design
The Problem
● Mobile browsers zoom out to the width of the site
● Difficult to read, touch links. and navigate
I know what awesomeness is, but what's
responsiveness?
● It's how your site reacts to the screen it's being display
upon. Minimizes issues by adjusting to the screen
● Responsive design is very important with delivering the
right content.

19. Why Responsive is Important
● Mobile friendly
● Mobile advertising
● Mobile traffic
● Professionalism
● User friendliness
● Increased conversations
● Current location (off topic but still cool)

20. Imagine you own a restaurant.

21. ● You run ads in a popular iPhone app.
● Your food looks delicious.
● Person clicks on your ad.
● They want to quickly see your menu and your prices.
● But your website isn't responsive. uh oh...

22. Instead they see a blurry slideshow
and tiny links. That might be beautiful
on your desktop but it's customer
repellent on a mobile phone. Which
of course is not cool.

23. This time your theme is responsive....
Person clicks on your ad. They want to quickly see your
menu and your prices. Your theme has beautifully
responded to the smaller screen on their
phone. Instead of the slideshow & tiny
links, they see big Beautiful buttons they
can easily touch.

24. Let me show you the way...
● This time your theme is responsive....
● Person clicks on your ad.
● They want to quickly see your menu and your prices.
● Your theme has beautifully responded to the smaller
screen on their phone.
● Instead of the slideshow & tiny links, they see big
beautiful buttons they can easily touch.
●

25. They browse your menu, check your hours without any
hassle from their phone. 10 minutes later they are dining in
your restaurant and complimenting your mobile website.

26. Resources
WordPress Themes
http://codex.wordpress.org/Using_Themes
http://codex.wordpress.org/Child_Themes
http://codex.wordpress.org/Functions_File_Explained
http://wordpress.org/extend/themes/
Responsive Web Design
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Responsive_web_design
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/magazine/hh653584.aspx
http://www.w3.org/TR/css3-mediaqueries/

27. by Clifton Hatfield
http://cliftonhatfield.com
http://facebook.com/cliftonhatfied.page
http://empoweredblogs.com