The description below assumes little to no knowledge of how a website is created.

For purposes of these instructions, a metaphor for building a house is used. WordPress is a website editor that provides a foundation for a website structure.

Think of WordPress as a building site with nothing but a cement slab laid. To build a website a framework or theme must be established in order to place content.

Think of a framework as the plans for building a house. The framework (theme) establishes the look and feel of the website.

Think of the look and feel like the style of the building ready to have the roof put on, ready for the interior or rooms to be built. The set of rooms and layout is a website’s theme ready for content to be added. Many themes are flexible and allow unlimited modification while others are rigid and difficult to change. Additional features can be added a website to make it specialized. These additional features are called Plugins and Widgets. 

Think of Plugins and Widgets as closets, bathrooms, and other special-purpose features of your building like sliding doors, air-conditioning, and a swimming pool. Plugins are external structures and may contain their own widgets that add additional style and functionality. Your site may need menus and submenus, tables, and different fonts. The options for plugins and widgets is unlimited.

Many plugins and widgets are free while others are based on donations and still others require an annual subscription such as complex group management widget with members dues tracking, banking, marketing, and mailing lists.

Adding content: Finally when a website’s structure is complete, it is ready for content. Think of content as your furniture, wall color, curtains and photographs. A wbsite’s content will be text, images, graphics and animations. Content is anything that is not structure. 

Selecting a theme that you feel will represents the type of framework needed to present your work is critical. When looking at themes, separate yourself from the content and concentrate on the structure. The theme developer fills the content to display how the structure will look with content.

Think of a theme as looking at a furnished house. Then, you have to replace the furniture with your own. Some themes are rigid and leave little room for modification. Others can be easily modified, while some themes are completely open-ended. Two themes that provide open-ended flexibility are Ocean WP and Hello Elementor. Elementor is technically a plugin that provides additional features such as a rich set of widgets and a wordprocessor-like webpage editor that needs no programming. In addition, it also has a number of page themes and a theme that is an empty foundation. This empty foundation called Hello Elementor (web-builder) coupled with Elementor’s wordprocessor style editing and built in widgets make it the choice of many WordPress developers.

To use the Elementor theme, the Elementor plugin must first be installed. Then, the Hello Elementor theme added to the available themes and selected. To use the Elementor theme, click here.