Recently I started doing some Express WordPress Installation Services on Envato Studio, and I learned a lot of valuable lessons that I thought were worth sharing.
First of all, you can see all sorts of ways themes are to be installed and to my surprise one area was so obvious which is installing demo content that comes with most modern themes nowadays, so let me explain how is that.
The First Surprise:
Most users find that after installing the demo content, their sites don’t look any way close to the theme’s own demo site, and the first reason for that is images. Most theme developers don’t package the images they use with their themes due to copyright issues, so you end up having a dull looking site although you followed all the right steps.
And here is a live example for the first surprise:
This is what you see on the demo site,
But this is what you get after you install the theme:
The Second Surprise:
This one is that there are so many different ways that demo content is installed:
- For some themes all you need to do is Install the Importer plugin from the WordPress Repository and click import , and you’re good to go and everything is ready, but that’s just the very few of them, and those are often referred to that as a once click demo install.
- For some themes, you need to install a special plugin to do the import for you, and the ones I’ve seen worked pretty well.
- For other themes you can import the demo content normally but then need to add the widgets manually, and this still is considered good, as it involved minimal work.
- To my surprise, some theme authors wouldn’t include the demo.xml file with the package you download and you need to open a support ticket to get it delivered to you via email, ( which I personally find so annoying!).
- The worst type I saw was themes where you had to install the demo content to find nothing has changed for your site and after over two hours of trial and errors I found that they had built all their homepage layout using Widgets and I was supposed to setup the widgets one by one using custom HTML code they’ve included in the Help folder to finally get the layout I was looking for! And they refer to this as Detailed Documentation.
So, if having easy-to-install demo content with your theme is an important issue for you, make sure to read the theme description well before actually paying for it as you could end up with a lot of surprises if you don’t!
Hope you found that helpful and I look forward to learning about your experiences with installing theme demos.