Are you going to use even a fraction of the features you’re buying?

Have you ever gone into the supermarket cereal aisle and quickly escaped because there was just too much choice? You just wanted something crunchy. But hey, did you want peanutty crunchy? Healthy crunchy? Dried-berry chrunchy? Did you mean crispy or crunchy? Help! Just have toast.

The same can hold true for a WordPress theme. The choice is overwhelming. There are so many themes out there and once you decide on a theme, you still have options galore to choose from. A theme I like quite a bit has something like 5 sliders (I think, I lose track). I don’t know how to use 2 of them, 1 I’ve just never tried and I use 1 of them because … it’s the only one I know how to use. Hello, and I’ve been using WordPress for 10+ years. If that kind of overwhelm happens with me, what about for someone with less WP experience?

At the end of the day, you want to create content. Or let me rephrase, at the end of the day, that’s what your should be wanting to do. Not tweaking your design endlessly, not playing with 42 fonts over the course of 42 days and losing your day job in the meantime because you’re addicted to all of the features, but you’re sure that if you just find a way to make those content tabs work just right, you’ll have found the secret to financial freedom, so you no longer care that you’ve lost your job because now you have more time to tweak the background shading of the tabs.

You should really get out from time to time, though. If you’re just staying inside and trying to get the testimonial photo to be oval instead of rounded, I understand completely, but through sunlight you get vitamin D and your body needs it. In fact, your body needs vitamin D more than you need oval testimonial photos, so take your hand off the mouse, save your design and get out of your slippers and take a walk.

If your dog dies because you couldn’t decide on a font, there’s help for you.

Is your dog still alive? Take him out for a walk. The wonderful thing about dogs is that, even though you’ve been cooped up for days working on just the right timing of the slider transition, he still jumps for joy when you walk towards the front door in hopes that you’re going outside. Even when it’s just a trip to the bathroom, he doesn’t resent you. He can’t see the screen so well with his doggy vision, but he thought the Ken Burns slow moving image that you had up last Thursday was a good one and he hoped then that you would call it a day. He thought you were ready to go out when he saw that you then started in on Google fonts–but this time for the main navigation He rested his head on his paws and dreamt of days before there were so many WordPress theme options.

You know what a nice font is? Lato is a nice-looking font.

If your dog didn’t make it through your CSS tweaking of the parallax background settings, you could get a new dog. Go to the shelter, the shelter has great dogs–and the selection isn’t overwhelming. Like the selection of the level of opacity for the header area so that background image shows through just enough to make it look “artsy” and your business has the feeling that there’s a living person behind the scenes, not a HEX-color-created zombie.

Choose Lato as the general font for the entire site. You’ll be fine, I swear, get a new dog from the shelter (you’ll have to leave the house to do this), and go on a walk.

“But you didn’t help me design my site?!” you gurgle through brushing your teeth (for the first time in a week, I might add).

I’m helping you, I promise. Take a walk with your dog and enjoy the outdoors. If you live in a city, you can analyze fonts on signs. If you can walk in nature, see how the colors work together to provide the perfect palette of design excellence. Cool, right?

Then come home, delete everything you’ve done and, this is going to sound harsh, but just use the Divi WordPress theme from Elegant Themes. I’ve been through more themes than you have and that’s what I use and I don’t bother with any others anymore. I walk my dog. I walk my dog a lot. My dog loves me. Divi has one slider. It’s great. Can it do everything? I don’t know. I don’t care anymore. But my dog loves me. My sites look great.

Oh, one more thing. That new dog. He needs a name. Call it Lato.

P.S. Some of you hard-core purists out there have let me know, “Hey, but this site (at least as of Jan. 22, 2017) isn’t in Divi. What gives!?” Yeah, I know, but this is also the downside of using another theme–it takes some time to transfer some of the more custom work to another theme. Yet another reason to Use One Theme and Use It Well.