Does this sound like you?  You are a blogging beginner and you find the PERFECT website theme for your new WordPress website.

You follow all of the instructions to upload the theme to WordPress and when you are finished, your website looks NOTHING like the demo.

This blog post details an easier option to format your website the way you want to, even if you are a beginner.

Disclaimer: This post may contain affiliate links, which means I may receive a commission, at no extra cost to you, if you make a purchase through a link. Please see my full disclosures page for more information.

• • Dictates the complete design of the entire WordPress site, which determines the general appearance and how the website functions. This includes fonts, color palettes, page layouts, sizing, positioning, etc.
  • Only one theme can be active on a website at a time
  • To customize theme, CSS coding is needed
  • Installing additional plugins may be required to make a theme run properly

• • A single page layout, available within a WordPress theme
  • Applicable to only certain website pages, rather than the entire site
  • Usually, there are templates designed for different page types (ex. Home page template, About me page template) and different portions of a page (ex. Header, Footer)
  • Multiple templates can be used on a website at one time
  • Does not utilize shortcodes or separate plugins to edit the template.  Templates are edited right in the template plugin (in this post’s example-Elementor plugin).

Its pre-designed templates also make it easy to replace images and text with your own, so that you have a beautifully designed website that you only have to plug in your own information into.

Elementor offers free and paid template kits, that contain collections of templates for the portions of your site, that can be combined together for a cohesive website look.  For example, this blog post utilizes the header template, footer template, and single blog post template. 

Template kits include and combine all of the parts of your website that you might need in a package for you.  You can choose to download all parts of the template kit, or select only certain parts of the kit to download.

Elementor offers template kits based on your unique website design needs.  For example, a real estate company would likely utilize a different template kit from a website that sells online courses.  

Knowledge is power, and every web creator wants their website to be powerful, with optimal performance and visual design assets that leave a lasting impression on every visitor”

(GILLIS, 2022)

Captivate your readers attention with a catchy, concise introduction (you can do this by including statistics, a quote, or a story).

Every paragraph should start with a subheader.  This improves readability for your reader and for Google SEO, when it crawls your website.

Use a combination of different paragraph sizes, subtitles, indentations, quotes and bullet points to keep your reader engaged.  Limit paragraph lengths to 1-2 sentences. 

Paragraphs longers than are hard to read and difficult to focus on if reading on a mobile device (this is where most of your readers will be reading from).

Repeat H2 (Subheader) and H3 (Subsection) in your blog post, as needed, to get your point across.  I also like to include an image in each blog post that can be used as a Pinterest Pin, incase a reader wants to share the blog post to their Pinterest board.

 If you are a blogging beginner, templates make setting up your website so much easier, with their drag-and-drop feature.  I hope that I’ve saved you some frustration that I experienced in my early blogging days.  

Thank you for hanging out with me and reading this blog post.  Is there something else you would rather read about instead?  Let me hear it!