Thanks for your detailed comment, and I’ll start off by saying that you’re on the right track by using the Themes from Elegant Themes. If there’s one “theme” that’s been consistent over the years with Nick and the Elegant Themes Club it has been their commitment to keeping themes updated with the latest features and functionality.

In regards to your question, I would say that thanks to the ePanel framework that runs each of the Elegant Themes WP Themes, you really won’t need to know much about the code to do a lot of customizations to the site. This was the point all along of making a framework that was so user friendly – so people such as yourself could customize their site with ease.

Beyond that, the support forums are great at Elegant Themes, and I know they’ll be willing to help with any trouble you may run into.

Best of luck!

I am fairly new to this process and have been spending a lot of time education myself. My husband and I own a small business (3 years) and initially paid a designer to develop our website. While we liked the design, the site is static and any changes we wanted to make (minor or major) was always a chore and costly! About 6 months ago we decided that we wanted more control over our site and decided to invest in a word press platform. We re-hired our designer to help us set up a word press site with the understanding that the designer would teach us how to use the site to add and update our own content (The designer had never used word press before so we purchased a theme forest design (4 star) to help the designer get a ‘jump start’ on our new site). This was a big mistake! We were charged a fortune and the work was not completed, the designer complained the entire time about how difficult word press is and swears they will never use it again. The designer never taught me (a newbie at this) how to finish the project successfully and to this day we still not having a working site.

We have decided to not continue with this site theme and start again. I discovered Elegant Themes on my own and decided to purchase a membership for $39. I have looked through the designs Nick offers and read through many forum discussions and am finding my way. I am trying to decide which design to choose as there is not one that fits my vision exactly. We do not want a blog style format as we would prefer pages with a separate blog area. We also want social media icons at the top of the home page, e-commerce, advertisements and a member login area.

My question is how difficult is it for someone with my experience to customize a theme without getting into too much trouble? We are thinking of using Evolution. Any help or tips that you can offer a newbie would be very much appreciated!

Thanks!
Cheri

I used elegant themes for my website and i’m very happy with how it turned out.

To be honest, I didn’t really try any of the other template providers as I thought the price for elegant themes was just so good that it would be crazy not to try.

Here’s my site: http://markmccann.com.au/

I’m not sure how good they are for SEO as I’ve been reading some things from yoast.com and they were not very encouraging.

Hope you guys like my site. If anyone has tips on how to improve the SEO for me I’d love to hear about it.

Mark

All i can say is I was looking for a simple solution for a good wordpress theme. I had the free Eximus theme but found myself making so many adjustments to the CSS and other stuff that my coding on the website was for sure a shocker to Google. I am very new to the website building and once I signed up for Elegantthemes I was very impressed. They are easy to modify very well written CSS .I think its a no brainer forking out $39 .Just think of the time you will spend to troubleshoot and build your own. Time is money.

I managed to adapt my scratch cards affiliate site to the themes with ease. I also know that if I do decide to change themes that it will not be hard to amongst all the others on offer at Elegant themes. The short codes will still work and they are built on the same foundation. I plan on rolling out more Scratch card Affiliate sites hopefully in the future and the fact that it is an unlimited license makes it even more of a no brainer and so easy to roll out.

I think that Nick has the right attitude to giving us such great themes at such an amazing price. I am looking forward to being a long time paying customer.

Jenny – ScratchCardQueen

I found it difficult to find the look and feel I was after in a free theme. Having tried both options I can definitely say it’s worth paying a little up front have the look and user friendly features I want.

I have written a review my theme in my blog.

PayPal is indeed the only way to pay for Elegant Themes membership although I don’t think you need to have an account to pay (not 100% sure on that though).