Meredith's Husband: 0:24

I think it's going to be a short one today.

Meredith: 0:25

Famous last words.

Meredith's Husband: 0:26

Yeah, I know. I've said that probably on all the longest episodes we've ever done.

Meredith: 0:30

Yes, undoubtedly. I do too.

Meredith's Husband: 0:33

How do you choose a theme for a WordPress site? So I've said I've said, I don't even know how many times how great WordPress is for SEO. Right. But WordPress on its own, it's just flexible. There are no built-in SEO features.

Meredith: 0:47

Oh, okay.

Meredith's Husband: 0:48

When you get a WordPress site, the first thing that you have to do is you have to choose a theme. Now some themes are free. They come with WordPress. There's one every year. There's like 20, there was 20, 21, 22, 23. Every single year there is a new default WordPress theme. When you install WordPress, it will have that theme activated.

Meredith: 1:04

Okay. Got it.

Meredith's Husband: 1:05

And it's usually super boring, super plain. Of course. Basic, though.

Meredith: 1:10

Something to grow on.

Meredith's Husband: 1:11

Right. So then you need to choose a theme.

Meredith: 1:13

Okay.

Meredith's Husband: 1:14

And this is where WordPress is it's it's very flexible, yes, which is awesome, but it's also can be a bit of a disadvantage here because uh there must be tens, maybe even hundreds of thousands of themes out there. Which do you choose? Some of them are not good. Okay. Right.

Meredith: 1:31

Or not good for what you need.

Meredith's Husband: 1:34

I would say some of them are just plain not good.

Meredith: 1:36

Okay.

Meredith's Husband: 1:37

I know that for a fact. Now, some of them are might are good for what you need. Some of them are not good for what you need. They might be good for what somebody else needs.

Meredith: 1:48

Right.

Meredith's Husband: 1:49

There's a lot of photography-focused themes out there that uh presumably are built more for photographers that should be better for photographers. The problem when you are getting a theme, there's lots of these um uh what are they marketplaces where you can buy a theme.

Meredith: 2:03

Yeah.

Meredith's Husband: 2:04

There's um Creative Market. Creative Market. There's one, there's a big one called Theme Forest. There's there's a bunch of them. And these themes can range from anywhere from like, I've seen them for nine bucks, I've seen them for a thousand bucks, and everywhere in between. Now, an issue, let's say, with those themes is that they are the goal of those themes, and especially if they're selling it nine dollars a piece, is going to be volume. They need to sell them to a whole bunch of people in order for that theme to be successful and for it, you know, to pay for itself, essentially. So, by definition, those themes then need to satisfy a whole bunch of different people. Like and unknown people. Not all, you don't know that they're all going to be photographers. You don't know that they're all going to be vets or living in this country or that country. So they've got to be very flexible. So what happens then is the people creating those themes put in a whole bunch of different features. Whoa.

Meredith: 3:01

Really Buster. He's on my lap.

Meredith's Husband: 3:03

Did he develop one of these things?

Meredith: 3:05

He must have. He's trying to get his Buster.

Meredith's Husband: 3:09

And so they do that by writing code. The more code that they create, the more things, the more features that they can include, and the more people that their theme can satisfy.

Meredith: 3:20

Okay.

Meredith's Husband: 3:20

Now, unfortunately, that leads to what we call a very bloated theme. More code. And for any individual person, there's going to be a lot of code there that you don't need. Right. Even if you're not aware, even if it's a fairly uh streamlined theme, there's still going to be a lot of stuff that you personally won't need.

Meredith: 3:39

But it's still there.

Meredith's Husband: 3:40

It's still there. I don't know. I think there's probably like, I'm going to guess in the neighborhood of on just an average kind of WordPress website, there's probably 10,000 different files installed.

Meredith: 3:51

Wow.

Meredith's Husband: 3:52

That's a lot. Okay. And I've seen them with like 10 times that amount because the develop developers just go nuts. And that's when you start to run into problems. Number one, it slows your website down. The more code that you have, the more it slows it down. There's more things that are potentially going to conflict with other plugins that you might install. There's more things that they're going to need to be updated. And that after a few years, if you have a bl a big bloated blog, you have a BBB. There are going to be a lot of things there that you need to update. So when you buy a theme, the things you want to look for are something that is established, like a developer that is established. And I would say if you were on Show It, like the themes on Show It, they have that's an added layer of protection because whoever is creating those themes, they have to follow Show It's guidelines and they have to do certain things so that Show It will agree to put it on its site. Because if it's a shitty theme, Show It is not going to sell it to you. And no way. So if you're on, so I that's an advantage of show it, I think. The themes are probably more streamlined if they're not going to be as bloated. There are lots of other themes. Like I forget the name of it, but I know the single most popular theme in the world, meaning it's on that's a font.

Meredith: 5:25

I know.

Meredith's Husband: 5:26

Meaning it's on the biggest number of websites. I know it is extremely bloated. And if you are using it, you're going to have a pretty slow site. Now it's called I don't remember. I've worked with it many times.

Meredith: 5:40

Right.

Meredith's Husband: 5:40

When I had a developer working for me, every time I would mention that theme or somebody would come to us and they would be on that theme, she would just be like, oh God. Yeah. So I mean, what you want to do, the ideal solution would be to create your own custom theme.

Meredith: 5:58

Yeah.

Meredith's Husband: 5:58

To use that default theme that comes with WordPress and then customize it yourself. Now that's difficult, that's not easy. Because I can't do that. I would need to hire a developer. But I'm just telling you, this is not realistic for most people, but I'm just telling you what the ideal would be. What happens in that situation is you have a designer.

Meredith: 6:16

Yeah.

Meredith's Husband: 6:17

They design what the site should look like, and they can use programs like Figma or there's other programs or just Photoshop. You take that design, you take layouts, you give it to the coder, and then they create your WordPress site to look like that. That's the ideal because then there's nothing, there's no bloat. Everything is very streamlined to exactly what yes, exactly. So that's on one end of the extreme what you would like to do.

Meredith: 6:39

Yeah.

Meredith's Husband: 6:40

On the other end of the extreme would be installing WordPress, going on a uh probably a lesser quality marketplace and buying a cheap theme and installing that. That's going to lead to problems.

Meredith: 6:51

Right. Is there a way to qualify?

Meredith's Husband: 6:55

There is. You can definitely look at you know how how long the theme developer has been around, how long have they been creating and updating their themes? And they will usually say that because that's kind of a if they've been around at all they want to promote. Yeah.

Meredith: 7:10

Right.

Meredith's Husband: 7:11

Also, definitely look at the reviews. Wherever you are thinking of purchasing this, there should be reviews. Look at the bad reviews specifically and see what people say are the issues that they deal with. If it's just things like I don't like it, okay. That's true.

Meredith: 7:24

It's not pretty to me.

Meredith's Husband: 7:25

If it's if they say things like I updated and my site broke, which is very common, by the way. That is something if if you see a bunch of people saying that in the thread, that's not a theme that you want.

Meredith: 7:35

Uh no.

Meredith's Husband: 7:36

Right. Okay. So what is a kind of happy medium? Because I know developing your own WordPress theme with a developer. We'll have time for it. And a designer, probably not everybody's cup of tea, not my cup of tea, to be honest. And the other extreme you want to stay away from. So what would I recommend besides probably going to a what I would say is a uh a quality marketplace. Like uh Creative Market. Creative Market is probably one. Theme Forest, I think, is is pretty okay. It's better than a lot. But then again, be very careful if you're if you're using Theme Forest, look at those reviews. And there are others. Just yeah, look at reviews, try to pick a theme that you like. Or this is where I tend to think show it has an advantage because they've pre-selected a bunch of themes and they've kind of vetted those themes and they know that they work, they know that they function, they're going to take care of updating them.

Meredith: 8:31

Oh, really?

Meredith's Husband: 8:32

Yeah. So that takes a sort of added weight off with show it. You get the advantage of having a WordPress site.

Meredith: 8:39

Really?

Meredith's Husband: 8:40

And the added sort of benefit of having I've never actually built a site on Show It, but people say it's it's a lot more user-friendly. It's a little more like Squarespace. It's a little easier to do.

Meredith: 8:53

And how is the SEO on Show It?

Meredith's Husband: 8:55

Pretty good because you're mostly on Square, on goddamn, WordPress. So many words to press. You're most of your site is going to be on WordPress. So you can do all the things, almost, you can do almost all the things that you can do with a WordPress site with ShowIT. It's just some of your pages are not going to be on WordPress. They're going to be on sh specifically on ShowIT servers. Okay. And there are a couple things, like when you're on Squarespace, there are a couple things that are specific to Show It that you want to make sure that you do. In Showitz case, it's a there's a very unique site map condition where you have to have two different site maps. Uh but otherwise, I think Show It is a pretty good solution. I think it's pretty solid.

Meredith: 9:37

Wow. That's that's high praise.

Meredith's Husband: 9:39

Yeah. Trying to think if there's another Wix? Wix is not on WordPress. That's something totally different.

Meredith: 9:46

Okay.

Meredith's Husband: 9:46

Same kind of idea. You you can choose a theme, you build your own site. I gotta say, Wix has done some really great things with SEO, but I think I've already mentioned the the use of the intuitiveness of their user interface. Oh, it's not friendly. I did not like it. I did not like it at all.

Meredith: 10:02

But so many stars have made commercials about it.

Meredith's Husband: 10:06

And they must have done that because they use Wix to create their own their celebrity website. And they enjoyed the experience so much they said they called up Wix and said, Can I do an advertisement for you? I don't need money. I just want to share my experience.

Meredith: 10:21

I want to share my experience. That's good to know.

Meredith's Husband: 10:25

Okay. So I hope that is helpful.

Meredith: 10:27

Yes.

Meredith's Husband: 10:28

Um, I hope that, you know, don't definitely don't go out and buy a a cheap theme and think they're all the same. They are not. Right. Okay.

Meredith: 10:35

Right. That's good to know. Is there a way to know what's good and what's not?

Meredith's Husband: 10:39

Well, the reviews. I mean, using a using a quality marketplace, they're gonna vet, they're gonna do some, they're not going to sell the worst ones because they obviously want their own good reputation. You right? They don't want people coming to their marketplace and buying a theme and figuring out it's terrible that makes the marketplace look terrible. Right. So the mar so uh the better marketplaces are going to do a better job of vetting their themes.

Meredith: 11:03

Got it.

Meredith's Husband: 11:03

Then look at the reviews.

Meredith: 11:05

Got it. Thank you.

Meredith's Husband: 11:07

Then here's here's another here's a here's one more idea. If if you know some of your competitors or you know somebody is using a WordPress site, you can go and look at the code and try to figure out what theme they're using.

Meredith: 11:19

How?

Meredith's Husband: 11:20

When you right-click on a website, one of the options is view source.

Meredith: 11:23

Yeah.

Meredith's Husband: 11:24

Well, if you know how to read code, you can read it and figure out it doesn't. Or what you can do is just copy and paste the entire thing and go over to Chat GPT and say, what here's a here's a page, the source code from a page on a WordPress site that I really like. What theme are they using? And it will usually be able to tell you this won't always work because sometimes people can hide the name of the theme, like a developer, uh like a like a coder I mentioned. They will start with a theme and then they will customize it, and then they will change the name of the theme so other people can't do that. So that's so this won't always work. But if somebody just installs a theme and then starts using it, which is what most of us do, then the name of that theme is going to be somewhere in the code and you can just ask ChatGPT.

Meredith: 12:07

How about that?

Meredith's Husband: 12:08

Yeah. And tell ChatGPT that Meredith's husband sent you. You know, I have asked ChatGPT to rewrite some emails that I have drafted for consulting clients, and it does it, except that it signs it Meredith husband.

Meredith: 12:23

Oh, that's so funny.

Meredith's Husband: 12:24

Yeah. I don't know how to feel about that.