HOW TO C HOOS E TH E RIGHT

T HEM E FOR YOU R WE BS ITE

If you’re having trouble deciding which theme to

choose, this guide will immensely help you!

© No part of this ebook or any other Free downloadable material from Restored 316 may be shared,
forwarded, blogged, or otherwise reproduced without express written permission from Lauren Gaige.
All material is copyright Restored 316, LLC 2016-2017
Here at Restored 316 we receive emails every single day asking what our opinion is on
which theme a customer should purchase. Considering we receive what feels like a
million emails a day, we aren’t always able to answer fully for every situation, so I wanted
to put together a comprehensive guide on choosing a theme that fits your business best!

We realize there are lots of themes to choose from and they all have different colors and
structures and this process can all be very overwhelming. I’ve put together this guide to
help you Plan, Prepare, Pick, and Publish your new website!

I want you to get down and dirty with this little guide, so I’ve created a printable
worksheet for just the question part of this guide so you can easily print and answer
those without wasting a bunch of ink! By the end of this process, I hope you have gained
clarity over your brand, what your business is about, and ultimately what theme is going
to suit your business best!

DOWNLOAD WORKSHEET

PLAN

Let’s start by planning out what your readers/customers want from you, and what you
need displayed on your site.

PAINT A PICTURE OF YOUR WEBSITE VISITORS

The very first step in deciding on what you need is to evaluate your target market. We
want to know all about the people visiting your site.

Let’s work through the following questions to get a better understanding of who is
visiting your site and what they will need from you:

Questions can be found in the printable worksheet to print and complete

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 Paint a picture of your ideal customer:
How old are they? Female or Male? Where are they located? What is their
status (ie: married/unmarried, wealthy/middle class, etc)?
What problems are you solving in your market?
Chances are you aren’t the only one doing what you’re doing in your
market. But what problem are YOU solving for your customers/readers
that no one else is?
What value are you going to offer your readers or clients?
What valuable asset are you bringing to the table for your readers that is
setting you apart from everyone else?
What is this market wanting to see from you?
Base this on the answers above. Is that thing you’re solving above blog
posts with helpful tips? Or is it offering valuable products that haven’t
been seen before? What is that primary thing that people are going to
want to see from you?

Now that we know a bit more about your market, let’s start diving into the fun stuff and
make some decisions about what actually needs to be on your site.

WHAT ARE THE IMPORTANT ELEMENTS OF YOUR SITE?

Questions can be found in the printable worksheet to print and complete

Based on the answers above about your target market, what are some of the
things you need to make sure you have on the home page?
Here are some examples:
• If the value you are adding to your clients is a free ebook or printable
when they sign up for your newsletter, we know we need this featured on
the home page with a sign up form.
• If the primary thing you are offering your customers is lots of blog
content, then we probably want a way to organize that content based on
category on the home page.
• If you are just offering your services or selling products, we need a to
display those things on the home page.
Will I need a blog?

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 For most people, this answer will be a resounding Yes! For others, this
may be a no, and most people aren’t aware that you can have a WordPress
site without a blog.

If not displayed on the home page, what are other areas of your site that are
important?

What features do you need on your site? Newsletter subscribe option? Slider
with latest blog posts? Latest products?

PREPARE

Now that we know what your customers want, and what needs to be on the home page,
we need to prepare all of our content.

CONTENT CREATION

Let’s discover the top pages you’ll likely have on your site:

Home: This page will be determined by the theme you select which we will cover in the
‘Pick’ section of this guide.

About: A typical about page will have an image of you, a little bit about you and your
story, and some details about what your website is about. You’ll want your about page to
be inviting and personal. The majority of people love to connect personally to the owner
of a website and this gets them connected to your brand and they will want to know
more!

Contact: A contact page has your basic information about how people can get in touch
with you. You’ll be able to place a form on this page as well that your readers can
complete and an email will be sent directly to you.

Blog: The blog page is automatically created based on posts you have created. To launch
a blog I recommend creating a minimum of 5 blog posts.

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 Questions can be found in the printable worksheet to print and complete

Besides the pages listed above what other pages will you need?

Based on the answer above, what pages do I need to create content for?

My suggestion on creating content for your site is to begin a new Word document or add
a page directly into your WordPress dashboard if you’ve already got this up and
installed. Create all the content your site will need so it’s ready to simply copy and paste
in to your site when you’re ready!

PHOTOGRAPHY

Custom Photography: You may choose to hire a photographer and have them shoot
some images just for you and your brand. If this is the route you decide, you’ll want to
get on their schedules immediately as most photographers are booked months in
advance. Custom Photography prices range widely but a good estimate would be in the
$1000 range so you’ll want to keep that in mind when choosing this option.

Stock Photography: Another option is to use stock images for your website. This
industry has boomed in the last several years and everywhere you turn there is a new
stock photography shop popping up. Stock photos can range from around $15 to around
$80. Below are some of my absolute favorite resources:

PAID STOCK PHOTOGRAPHY RESOURCES

• SCStockshop– Shay Cochrane is my absolute favorite stock photographer.

The work she produces is unmatched and she was the original photographer
that started the stock photography craze. Because her photography is top
notch, her prices are the highest when it comes to stock photography. That
in mind, she does only sell the images a limited number of times, so you do
get a little of that exclusivity without paying custom prices. You will see
Shay’s images used the most in my theme demo sites.
• White Hart Design Co.– Anything with flowers, nature, and a vintage touch
has my heart wholly and completely, so it’s only natural I include this

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 resource. Lucie is a fabulous photographer and her aesthetic is so different
than a lot of the other resources out there. If your brand has this vintage
touch to it, Lucie is your girl!
• TwigyPosts– With white space her trademark, Jana’s stock photography is
very minimal and clean. She offers many sets that are incredibly reasonable,
making it easy for you to have a consistent brand and plenty of images to
use on your site and across social media.
• Haute Chocolate– This resource is a bit different than the rest. This site is
membership only and runs about $30 a month. Every month Rachel adds
new images to her site ranging from bright and colorful to vintage and
subtle. This is a fabulous resource if you have an ongoing need for stock
photography!
• Creative Market– Two of the above photographers have their photography
for sale through Creative Market but there are many many more fabulous
photographers there selling their work. If the above photographers don’t
have the aesthetic you’re looking for, check out the entire Creative Market
gallery. I’m sure you’ll find something there that fits your brand!

FREE STOCK PHOTOGRAPHY RESOURCES

• Unsplash- Unlike the paid resources above, the free options are nearly all
lifestyle and nature style photography. Unsplash has a large selection of free
images that can be used anywhere you’d like!
• Minimography- Another fabulous free resource. All the images here have a
minimal feel to them. Love the nature & blue aesthetic of these images…
makes my heart happy.
• Death to the Stock- Don’t get hung up on the name of this one. If you
subscribe to this site you’ll get monthly packs of images that you can use
anywhere you’d like. This resource is huge and used by everyone I know, so
it’s likely you’ve seen their images before and you just didn’t know it was a
free stock image.

PICK

Now to the fun part! Hooray! We finally know what you need on your site so now let’s
learn how to pick the theme that best suits your business.

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SEE THEMES IN BOXES

This one thing I wish I could get through to every single person that browses our theme
store. Instead of looking at themes with all the predefined colors and images, think of it
in boxes. Let’s take our most popular theme, Darling, for example - see the screenshot on
the last page.

Let’s break this entire theme down into sections and explain what each section is capable
of:

Navigation- You can choose to use 1 or 2 navigation menus. You don’t necessarily have
to use both, although both are there if needed. If your site is primarily a blog, then the 2
navigations come in handy when you want to display your common informational type
pages and then the other for your blog categories. The point here is that when you’re
looking at a theme, you don’t have to use both navigation menus shown!

Logo- With EVERY theme we offer, you can upload your own logo. This makes every
theme completely unique to you! So if you’re walking into theme selection with your
own logo, pay no attention to the default text shown. 95% of everyone who uses our
themes will be uploading their own logo!

Full Width Slider or Single Image- This section is simply a widget space. All this means
is that technically you can put whatever you’d like here. Most people love sliders
because you can highlight several areas of your site or showcase new products you’ve
launched. However, this space can also be used for a single featured image. And even
more outside the box, you could use this space for a featured video.

Featured pages- Again these are simply widget spaces and in the Darling theme for
example, this space is flexible. This means that if you only have 3 featured pages you
want to highlight, it will format 3 across instead of 4 based on the amount of widgets you
put in this space. Don’t have featured pages you want to highlight? No problem! You
can add TEXT widgets here as well and highlight 3 or more services instead.

Featured Widget- This is another widget space and you can choose to use this space or
not. This area is incredibly versatile and is a great place to add a newsletter sign up box,
featured products, a little text verbiage, or anything else you wish on the home page of
your site!

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Blog Posts-: With the Darling theme, you can remove the blog posts from the bottom of
the home page. So if you don’t have a need for this section, you don’t have to use it.
Again, completely versatile!

Footer Widgets- Again, these are additional widget spaces. You can choose to use them
or not and you can add absolutely anything you want to these spaces.

Theme Colors- Every color you see can be tweaked to your liking! You aren’t boxed in to
having only pink across your site, I promise! I want you to feel like you have complete
freedom to make the theme you select fit you and your brand.

You have read a lot about widget spaces, so let me explain what these are in detail. Each
block that you see on these above screenshots, are all widget spaces within WordPress.
Each of those blocks can have their own unique widget in that space. For example, if you
see a featured page widget in that space, you can also just simply put an image there and
link it to a specific blog post or featured product using a text widget. If you are looking
at a theme and wonder “what on earth would I put in that space?”, you don’t have to use
that widget space at all! This is what makes our themes so incredibly versatile! It’s hard
to display all that a theme is capable of in a few simple screenshots, so this guide offers a
new view on how to see a theme outside of it’s colors and image selections.

NARROW DOWN THE SELECTION

Now that we know to keep the colors and images out of our minds when selecting a
theme, we can now just focus on the functionality and format of the theme and choose
what best fits our needs from the worksheets we completed in the Plan section of this
guide.

Let me offer some examples using our themes that will help you choose the best theme
for your site:

For the Blogger first

• Glam • Delightful • Market

• Savory • Divine • Dazzling

• Tasteful • Darling

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For the Creative Entrepreneur focusing on products first

• Captivating • Adorn • Market

• Tickled Pink • Sprinkle • Cultivate

• Dainty • Tickled Pink
• Blossom
For the Entrepreneur first with a focus on newsletter building

• Tickled Pink • Darling • Dazzling

• Novelty • Simply Charming • Cultivate

• Style • Market

For the Creative // Photographer, Designer, or other service based creative business

• Tickled Pink • Darling • Market

• Novelty • Bloom • Dazzling
• Faithful • Simply Charming • Cultivate


PICK THE THEME THAT BEST FITS

A few things to keep in mind when choosing your theme is that even though a theme
may be named Savory and is loaded with food based images, doesn’t mean you need to
be a food blogger. Imagine the theme in boxes and imagine your OWN content and
images filling the spaces.

Remember that all themes are built up of widget spaces and are extremely flexible. You
can choose to use them or not to showcase your own content. You don’t have to use
every widget space and fill it with unnecessary information. You want to show your
readers only the necessary information and not overwhelm them with ‘stuff’ that doesn’t
matter.

You should have a pretty good idea of what theme will fit your needs by this point so it’s
time to pick the theme that best fits all your needs based on everything we’ve gone over.

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PUBLISH

INSTALL AND SET UP YOUR THEME

Now that you’ve decided on a theme it’s time to get it all up and going! If you already
have a WordPress site you’re probably pretty familiar with this process. If you have
never set up one of our themes, you’ll want to see our Quick Start Guide to help you get
up and going!

HOW DO I START A WEBSITE?

If you’re just starting a website and need some help through the process you’ll want to
see our How to Start a Website page on our site. We also have the option there to
download a printable PDF if you’d like!

IN CLOSING

I hope this Comprehensive Guide to Choosing the Right Theme for your Website has
helped you gain clarity over your brand, what your business is about, and ultimately
what theme suits your business best! The beautiful thing about our WordPress themes is
that they are extremely versatile and are very inexpensive, so if you decide to shift gears
with your site in the future, it’s as easy as starting this process over again to determine
the best new theme for your site!

If you have any questions about anything found in this guide, don’t hesitate to get in
contact with us.

Other helpful Restored 316 resources

• Setup & Support- If you’re setting up your new theme for the first time, see our Setup &
Support section with detailed instructions for each theme we offer. Don’t find the
answer you’re looking for? Don’t hesitate to submit a support ticket.
• Tutorials on the Blog- Our blog is a fabulous resource with a lot of great tips and
tricks as well as tutorials. Be sure to visit that from time to time to see the latest
tutorials we offer.

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• Become an affiliate- If you love your Restored 316 theme, you should absolutely
become an affiliate! We pay thousands of dollars every month out to our affiliate
members who are earning some extra income just by promoting a product they love!
You should join them!
• Other helpful resources- For more helpful resources and links of third party services
that may be helpful, I’ve compiled a helpful list on our Resources page. Don’t see
something here just ask!
• Freebies- And lastly, I love giving back where I can! We have an exclusive freebies
area just for our subscribers loaded with lots of fun goodies. Use the password
getinspired to gain access.

CONNECT WITH US

Instagram • Facebook • Pinterest • Twitter

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