Today, we thought we’d share a few of our most frequently asked questions about changing to an EmPress theme. We’ve gathered up questions (and answers!) from customer emails and Facebook, and we’re giving you the low down on everything you need to know pre-switch. Don’t forget, you can read more FAQs here, and check out our Help Desk pre-purchase area here.
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Q: How long will it take to install my theme?
A: Installing a WordPress theme is a breeze! Once you receive your purchase receipt and downloadable .zip file, it’s as simple as uploading it to your WordPress dashboard and activating it. This entire process should only take a couple minutes. If you need help installing your theme, check out our Help Desk articles, here.
Q: What about setup? Will it take me forever?
A: This one can be tough to predict, because it depends on your current blogging situation. For users with previous WordPress experience, plenty of available content, and well-organized categories and tags, it might only take an hour or two—even less if you know your way around menus and widgets in WordPress. Based on informal feedback we’ve gotten from users, we find the average customer will block out a weekend to focus on the site. This doesn’t mean you’ll spend every waking hour of your weekend on customizing! It just means it’s common for people to spend time tweaking, swapping out widgets and photos, refining calls to action and buttons, and generally making sure their site looks great over the course of a day or two. Customers who spend a weekend on their site frequently use our Code Hacks to further customize the look and feel of their site, which can take extra time, too.
As a general rule, here are the items that will slow down your theme set up process (in other words, try and address them before you change a theme!):
Issue: Blog does not have images in many posts, and/or does not have featured images assigned to posts.
Remedy: You should always assign a featured image to your post, and we recommend including at least one visual within the post itself to make the content more engaging for readers! If you have been blogging for a long time and haven’t been assigning featured images, try this plugin. It’s old and we’re not sure if it’s still maintained, but it was functional through WordPress 4.9.
Issue: No photos ready for content features, such as sidebars or interstitials.
Remedy: While many widgets in our themes will pull the featured image from your posts into their image containers, some require you to upload your own imagery. This gives you more control over the content you want to feature, be it an external link, a portfolio site, etc. It’s a good idea to have a library of images ready to go for these features. It might also require time spent resizing images to recommended specifications. If you’re in need of free photo resources, check out the list at the end of this post!
Issue: Posts do not have categories assigned
Remedy: Head to Posts > Categories and use the bulk edit feature at the top of your post list to assign categories to your content. This will make it easier to create menus, leading people to the content they are looking for. If you’re new to categories (and tags!), check out our complete guide to WordPress categories and tags, as well as more about the difference between categories and tags.
Issue: Not enough posts published, which causes the theme to look naked (or some features to not work).
Remedy: No easy one here except to begin publishing content! You can also publish test posts so that you can complete theme setup, if needed. Head to Posts from your Dashboard to delete them once you’ve got real content ready.
Issue: No clear brand vision, which results in lots of time spent playing with colors and fonts.
Remedy: We get it, changing up your site’s colors and fonts can be fun! It can also be a big time suck. We recommend thinking through the vision for your blog before you get started, so you can map a clear path for how you want to present yourself to the world!
Q: What type of support do you offer?
A: We offer unlimited email support for all customers with a valid product license! You can read our full support policy here.
Q: Can I get a refund if I don’t like my purchase?
A: Yes! We offer a 14-day money back guarantee. If you purchase a theme, plugin, or marketing collateral product from us and it’s just not for you, submit a support ticket within 14 days of the purchase date and we’ll issue you a full refund.
Q: How can I add in my own colors and fonts into the blog?
A: It depends which theme you’re installing! Our Hayes and Pearl themes both include built in color and Google Font controls, so you can customize both directly in the Customizer (view the Google Fonts library here). Additionally, our Rania theme includes color controls.
For all other themes:
All other themes are packaged with our Color Pack and Font Customizer plugins, which you can opt to install and activate. These plugins provide a great foundation of color and font choices, all of which can be changed with just a few clicks.
If you want to incorporate fonts not offered in our free plugin, you’ll need to either use a third party app to adjust the fonts, or work with a developer to install and style them for you (or do this yourself). If you have particular hex color codes in mind for your site, you’ll definitely want to check out our Code Hacks library. There, we feature small snippets of CSS code which allow you to customize all manner of things in our themes and plugins, including color.
Q: What size should my logo be?
A: There isn’t an exact size, as it’s going to be dependent on your theme, your theme’s header layout, and the logo artwork itself. Here’s a Help Desk article that dives into this more, and shows how different sizes look in one specific case. You can always size your logo at a few different widths, then upload each and test to see what you think best represents your brand identity not only on desktop, but mobile too!
Q: How can I make my site look exactly like the demo?
A: We are currently rolling out a library of Demo Guides in our Help Desk. Check there first to find the settings for your favorite theme demo!
If we haven’t published a Demo Guide for your specific theme preferences yet, our demo sites typically label what widgets and plugins are used where. You can use this as a guide to install widgets in the same feature areas to get a similar look! But, if you can’t quite get your theme to mimic a particular layout feature of one of our demos, you can visit your My Account area and submit a support ticket, or email us at hello@empressthemes.com with your question.
Don’t forget—the look and feel of a website is GREATLY impacted by the imagery you choose. We recommend using similar edits (or photo styles) across all images in use on your site, which is going to give you a consistent, identifiable aesthetic.
Q: I need to insert special tags in my header for my affiliate network/ad network/other analytics service. How can I do this?
A: While you can manually edit your site’s PHP header and/or footer files, we do NOT recommend this unless you are well-versed in coding PHP. This is because the site PHP is like your blog’s skeleton—break something in one spot, and it can break the whole site! Instead, we recommend anyone needing to insert code into their header or footer code use this plugin. It makes it really easy to insert the scripts you need, without touching our actual theme files!
Q: Are your themes compatible with my affiliate networks and/or networked ads?
A: Yes, many bloggers have successfully used our themes with third party affiliates and marketing platforms such as rewardStyle, ShopStyle, Amazon Affiliates, Google Ads, MediaVine, and more. Our themes are also compatible with the Disqus commenting system.
Q: Can I use your theme in a language other than English?
A: Yes! We’ve had a few customers use our themes in languages other than English. In some cases we’ve had to make a couple minor edits to translate text in the theme, which we’re happy to help with (just submit a support ticket here). And, if worse comes to worst and our themes don’t work with your language, we can always issue you a refund.
