WordPress – Stop Buying Themes Now!
Wordpress allows you to recreate most types of websites with its massive list of themes. If you want to make your own version of Airbnb, Facebook, Buzzfeed or even a fully multi vendor Amazon marketplace, you can hunt down the closest theme on Themeforest and you’re good to go.
Most themes are well documented and they offer decent support. This will basically save you thousands of coding hours.
I’ve selected a few themes below, but there are hundreds to choose from:
Create a social network like Facebook
Create a travel marketplace like Airbnb
Create a product marketplace like Amazon
Create a viral content site like Buzzfeed
In order to cater to the requirements of most projects, these themes have become quite powerful. And that’s awesome! But they’ve also become more and more complicated and the setup time for each project is growing.
In comes the magic combo : Elementor + ACF + CPT UI
Stop buying Wordpress themes in 3 simple steps (for ever)!
A theme does 3 things really well:
- 1 - Makes your designs look cool
- 2 - Gives you better control over your content
- 3 - Selects plugins for you to put it all together
1 - Fix your design forever with Elementor
Elementor is a really cool and free drag and drop page builder. It has become a standard among Wordpress designers and a whole eco-system has been created around it.
Page builders aren’t new, but this time Elementor and its add-ons give you full control of your site including the type of data shown to your users.
Widgets, sections and effects will make your website look awesome in seconds. Elementor also has great options for responsive design for your readers on mobile.
You can download Elementor for free here
2 - Take control of your content and data - all of it!
If you just need a portfolio website, Elementor is enough. However in order to build marketplaces and social networks, you’ll need to go one step further and add custom content.
What you need to know:
Post types:
One thing to understand from the beginning: pages and posts are both types of Posts.
- A page is a post with a post type called “page”.
- A post is a post with a post type called “post”
The naming is confusing but you just need to remember that most content on Wordpress is a “post” of some sort.
You can use this first difference to customise your websites look if the content is shown as a post or a page.
You can use Elementor for this. Create your first bespoke page:
Templates > Theme builder > Add template > Select page
Post type fields
Each post type can have a different design and structure. In other words, if you’re selling cars but also houses - your post type “car” can show engine size and colour, your post type “house” can show pictures and a dynamic map.
In order to create new post types, it’s a lot easier if you download CPT UI
Custom fields
By default, posts on Wordpress come with a basic field structure such as title, description, author and tags. If you’d like to show more personalised content of your business you’ll need to add custom fields.
For this you’ll need to download advanced custom fields (ACF)
Taxonomy
Posts can be linked together into categories by creating a taxonomy. This allows you to go even further in structuring your website.
No worries for this, you can go to back to CPT UI for this.
3 - Put it all together with Elementor
The last part of the puzzle is going back to Elementor, create a new page and pull the ACF custom fields onto you page.
Conclusion
So, should you really stop buying themes now? I think that if you're 100% certain that you’re only going to use one theme for one precise activity - you’re going to build Airbnb and that’s that - then go and buy a theme.
But if you plan on running several websites or if you’re an agency, I would at least take the time to test this awesome combo Elementor + ACF + CPT UI.