Advice on choosing WP theme please

Envato Customers Looking For
1

I’m a novice user with a lot on my plate and not a lot of time. Until I can afford to hire a developer, I’m on my own.

I formed a nonprofit. For its website, I went with Avada and their Charity theme, and then I invested a lot of time to learn to navigate it and to customize it for my initial needs. Here’s the result so far.

I can manage my way around well enough with it for now. (I’m just not thrilled with the sliders it imposes on every page. I have yet to confirm this but it seems the way the sliders interact with the menus along the top is such that the menus will not be all that readable at all times unless one uses a slider image on every page that has no large white areas, which I’m not thrilled about but I guess that’s livable since I don’t need a ton of pages – as long as it doesn’t require a slider for every blog-post page once I add back in a blog section.)

I’m now in need of creating a “personal” website that will act as a business promo site in the form of content marketing. This is where I will talk about my for-profit business (not yet using WP), my nonprofit, and my overall journey, vision, etc. For now it will be a relatively simple site, probably mainly a blog. I just need clean and simple for now and above all else I need a minimal learning curve and minimal time to get up and running.

To make the choice of what to go with, I’m considering the following:

A) Another Avada demo, which I’ll cut down dramatically to my bare initial needs to start, such as perhaps:

B) If it’s realistic, just a basic Avada Blog choice rather than an actual Demo, such as perhaps:

C) A different developer altogether, with a simpler looking demo, such as perhaps:

A concern I have is stability. I don’t have room for chasing down glitches. I assume staying with a major name like Avada minimizes that likelihood.

Having said all that, how much should I stay strictly with Avada solely because I have already gone through the learning curve to get as far as I have with it? And if I do, should I pick a Demo and pare it down to the basics that I need for now, or just pick a “blog” page type “page” and build a simple site from scratch that way for now? (I guess I’ll have to learn what the options are for using Avada without using a Demo.)

Thanks!

2

Hello,

Why you don’t try Enfold template. They have user friendly builder , very good support and regular updates.

3

Hmmm,

So there’s a few pieces here. First and foremost, I’d suggest contacting ThemeFusion support (if you haven’t already) you’re entitled to 6 months free support.

Multi-purpose themes by their very nature are big, multi-faceted products with a lot of moving pieces. The learning curve that your talking about can (but not always) be higher with a multipurpose theme than they might be in a niche theme that’s specifically built for say, a personal portfolio.

There are plenty of reputable authors out there who produce themes that won’t break on you.

I’d always encourage picking the best tool for the job.

1 Like
4

Personally - if you are building a basic and content light site then you should be looking for a more practical solution.

@matthewcoxy and @Zaccc are both right about Avada and Enfold being some of the best and most reliable themes around, but given that you would need to buy another license to use Avada again, then perhaps it’s an opportunity and worth spending a bit of time looking at all the options?

One thing worth considering if you plan to extend the site in the future - if you go for a more practical and straight forward blog type theme then you are likely to loose out on at least some of the versatility and flexibility that comes with the big themes.

5

Thanks.

This is still a bit daunting for me. If I look at “portfolio” themes at the link @matthewcoxy gave me, the first two at the top have numerous options that already mean I have to get into design choices:

https://themeforest.net/item/grand-portfolio-responsive-portfolio/14496218

https://themeforest.net/item/photberry-creative-photo-portfolio/20656096

The cost of time in learning (let alone exploring) is far more crucial to me right now than the cost of a theme. I’m therefore leaning towards staying with Avada and going with their Agency theme/demo/template, which their tech support suggested as one of the simpler “demos” they have and it has a pretty clean blog format that I like.

I’m not sure how I feel about the main header (menu) being at the left column, but I suppose it should be okay.

I’d have to delete a lot at first, which I’m used to from using another of their demos for another site to date, but other than that I think overall I might be best off doing this.

Having said that, I’m very receptive to any further comments or advice before I make any final decisions.

Thanks!