Troubles Faced Due To Less Knowledge about WordPress Themes

The best thing while using WordPress is that it provides so many solutions and options to kill the problem. It contains a wide variety of themes, ranging from the most simple to the most elaborate or complex ones, which are also available at almost any price or any style. The most amazing thing is that even the plugins have the fair share of being available in a huge amount and variety that can be simple or have a complex design, or they can be either free or might come with charges and anyone can choose whatever they like or want.

The dilemma is, when in the marketplace, people that have no or less technical wisdom, look for suitable themes for their use and then buy it without being able to evaluate whether they had made the right choice. All that such shoppers look for is a WordPress theme that contains SEO, so when they find a theme with SEO and also provide boxes for them to enter the data, they happily think that they have found what they were looking for but that's just not the case.

As long as the customers are working with a particular theme and are fine with it, it doesn't seem to raise a problem, but when they realize that they no longer desire to use the theme and need something new to display their content, they face trouble. When they get rid of the previous theme all the data or content they had entered lie custom pages or meta descriptions, etc. disappears, and in order to get all the content back, they either have to do a bunch of complex and puzzling work, go through the trouble of paying an expert to do so or add everything from the start all over again. For customer convenience, such a problem seems to be a frustrating hindrance.

Low-Information customers becoming victims to technical complexities

A problem that occurs widely is that the people looking for themes haven't really thoroughly pondered on what they want out of the theme and do not think about the problems they might face while choosing a particular theme. An individual needing a website just sets off without thinking in search of getting one. They discover that WordPress is a good option for that purpose and then they learn that SEO is important as well. So, eventually, they decide that they would be needing a WordPress theme, and after selecting any theme that they think seems to fit their need without proper thinking, they start putting data in it.

The people selling these themes are usually competing for matching up to one another by adding more and more features to the themes they sell because most of the people in the WordPress market of themes mostly spend the money they have on the list of such features that meet their desires and the customers understand. They don't want to or feel like spending time over understanding all the technical complexity their chosen theme has to offer or even in most cases they don't have the ability to do so. So if a theme that offers convenience and doesn't take up much time to understand and helps cut the work effort off a customer would definitely be the choice to opt for. So as a result, these customers having little info over technical complexities tend to become victims of WordPress theme problems.

Steps that should be taken by WordPress themes

When thinking about what jobs good theme should carry out, a very preferable thought used in software engineering can be used which is “Separation of Concern”. This idea of using the MVC pattern, although considered outdated or old-fashioned by most web programmers and is usually ignored is a strong technique. It makes sure that nothing in the system is performing too many jobs or doing a lot of work. The data becomes the model. There are controllers, which are used to act on the data. Along with that, a “View” is provided which has the job of displaying that data.

The most important thing that a good WordPress theme should do its function as a source for viewing (and viewing only) the data that is expected by WordPress to be shown with its help. Basically, it should only work enough to not provide functionality so that it may not affect the governing or managing area the site has.

However, some people debate over the fact the WordPress themes of today need to do more than the tasks they provide. These themes make it extremely hard for people to sell things because they present a layout of a blog. However, it is also true that the world today demands so much more of these themes, but it doesn’t mean that the themes have to not only display but also provide this functionality as well. What's preferable is a theme that relies on famous plugins to maintain and store data and does the job only for displaying it.

For people making eCommerce and requiring a WordPress theme that in turn requires means to list various products, it is advised that they get WooCommerce or any other reliable eCommerce plugin. The customers wanting to build an eCommerce business can also make their own plugins. There are tools, which are not well-known, might not be well-supported, or not be incorporated into the WordPress core as they should have been. These tools let a theme be declared to be dependent on reliable plugins.

The Things WordPress Themes Should Stop Doing

After pointing out what the WordPress themes should act like, below is a list of the things a theme should not do:

1. If a new component is made by the theme such as "page", then that means when the theme is switched over, the user will lose all the previous data or components like these that had been created. A person who is an expert in this can recover all the data by using plugins while a normal person having low expertise would fail to do so, which comprises most of the users. The solution to this is to help the users not have to do that, and that can only be done by adding plugins from the start that can do that job.

2. A theme should not create taxonomies. Contrarily, a theme tries to create a new tag, or type lie systems either for pages or posts, and the same happens which has been mentioned above when the theme is replaced. Although this data is never lost, an expert can track it down while he/she might only have to face a little problem, but a normal user can't. It just makes it inconvenient for a person who does not have much knowledge, therefore, has no sense for it to be performing such a function.

3. A theme should not function in a way that it stores data or provides the user with an interface for a custom data storage structure. While using such a theme that stores SEO data into a custom type storage structure, the instant the theme is replaced all of the stored data also goes away. Unlike the two cases mentioned above, even an expert would have to contribute a considerable amount of time and effort to be recovered, trying to figure out what kind of data storage structure the theme was using.

4. Last but not least, the chosen theme should not be providing shortcodes or other sources of adding unique elements for posting various contents. Unlike the three mentioned above it does not result in data loss, but it affects the site in a way that where there was a button for a task is now a bracketed link or sentence that contains the info of the content for the action, which does seem confusing to viewers. This problem can be fixed by adding a customized plugin for such shortcodes. But having a theme that does that is highly inconvenient.

How to make a sturdy system with WordPress themes

Generally, if you switch your previous theme with a new one and lose everything that you stored in it then that there is too much than what you wish for, but given the limits in the structure of WordPress, abstaining your theme from storing data and creating data storage structures and keeping it to the job of only displaying the content is a tough job. In the meanwhile, the customers should look for a more convenient theme and approach the creator of the theme, and try to explain the dilemma and request them to change the way the theme is made.

Swapping a theme can prove to be extremely risky for people wanting to form a WordPress site that is can be maintained and can function for several years or more. So, the demand for such a theme that does not need swapping, or when swapped does not result in loss of data should be requested by all the educated shoppers and professionals and experts should always try to create themes that do not strike such a possibility.