Whilst I love the internet and may have created a website or two of my own, I can’t design a webpage to look as I know it should. My coding skill isn’t at par with my imagination. Sound familiar? And then page builders were introduced and I breathed a sigh of relief!

We’ve talked about page builder WordPress plugins many times before, because there are just so many great options available. Well Designmodo recently released their own page builder for us to add to that list – Qards. Here is a small taste of Qards can do for you.

What Can Qards Be Used For ?

Qards is a great WordPress plugin with which you could build awesome webpages and perhaps even a website, page by page. You can use this drag & drop page builder to create beautiful, elegant and responsive web pages without any limitations.

Using Qards is very much like playing lego with a stack of cards, you fit them together and make the pieces fit. The plugin makes this process a delight and extremely easy.

The pages you create have none of the characteristics of your theme or your other pages, you start with a blank screen and go on from there. With Qards you can edit each and every tiny detail on newly created webpage, all without touching a line of code.

It means you can create pretty much any webpage suited to any purpose, I could create a shopping page or a webpage for a personal blog with a minimal design or a landing page with a grid style layout for photography website. Qards is advertised as a plugin that works with any WordPress theme and in all likelihood should do so. So no matter what type of site or theme you run, this plugin should come in handy if you ever need to build an awesome webpage.

And if you are a design expert and know your way around, you could add your code as well. But we’ll get to that later.

Using Qards

A simple add New Page window is available on the Qards WordPress dasboard, the magic starts here. You can add and save as many pages as you want from here. Once you create a new page, you are greeted by this screen.

And you have a number of options available, namely:

• Cover
• Image
• Text
• Feature
• Grid
• Menu
• Footer
• Subscribe

The user interface is very intuitive and easy to use. Anyone who’s ever used a drag and drop builder before will find using this plugin a breeze.

So after you create a new page, you can add the cards or content blocks which can be any one of the 8 aforementioned elements. Once you add a single block, the sidebar disappears and you can look at the would be webpage without any distractions. Now once again you can click on the plus icon at the bottom of your screen and add further content blocks.They appear one after the other. The entire process is very fluid and smooth.

Now I’ve added three random content blocks, here is what it looks like.

Fine-tuning Your Custom Blocks

You can use Qards to add new images, videos, change the position of the text on your webpage, choose between showing/not showing your header, hero and buttons. The colors can be modified and the content blocks can be moved up and down through the different levels. From this interface you can duplicate the content block and also customize the CSS. You can also add full screen videos from YouTube to your background. The screenshot below is serves an example for what changes can be incorporated into the content blocks once they are added.

A grid content block is always handy for any website that necessitates the display of portfolio. A example would be a stock broker displaying a portfolio of his/her best trades. The grid options make it possible to easily add new tiles, decide which elements of each tile are displayed, choose the layouts, use a seamless grid and also select the number of columns in the grid.

Any formatting changes like font or color to the text in a single tile is replicated in all tiles of the grid courtesy of Items Style Sync.

Feature is an element that can be used to draw attention to any single specific aspect of a webpage. You could use it to make your best selling book or product into the limelight. The image position & size can be altered and the background colors modified.

Images added to content blocks can be easily modified and a great deal of editing can be done. Position of image, the colors, embedded links and padding can be edited with Qards.

The inline text editor makes it easy for any text customization and formatting work. You can set the heading tags, make bold, italicize, add links and change font as easily as you would do with a Word document. This means that you’ll know how your website appears as and when you type new text or modify old text.

Similarly you add a menu, a footer, a header and a subscribe bar with the content blocks available by default on Qards. You could create a sticky menu, if that might suit the webpage you intend to create. All done with a few clicks of the mouse and the editing part is very intuitive as with the previous content blocks.

All of the content blocks can be removed, shuffled up and down the webpage and duplicated. And you can also modify the CSS if you’re confident you can make your webpage looks even better with a personal touch.

Edit HTML & CSS

For WordPress experts and the curious ones who’d really like to make the most of this plugin and have a bit of design skill, you can tinker a bit with the code and get the webpage’s appearance to exactly what you need. You can access the custom CSS option and change the CSS & HTML for all content blocks to your liking. Then you can update your preview and choose to keep the changes or not.

In addition, you can access appearance settings from your WordPress admin dashboard and modify the CSS elements of your webpages and also the global CSS settings of your page layouts.

If you’re using CSS Hero, it works very well in tandem with Qards. You can read up more about that here .

Feeling Doubtful ?

Watch this video and you’ll get a feel of how easy this plugin is to use.

Qards And WooCommerce

While you could theoretically create a great number of webpages for your website with Qards, this plugin best serves you when you use it to create one or a few pages as part of your overall website. For example, a one page website or a best selling product page or a portfolio page, etc. Here’s how you can use the power of Qards with WooCommerce and sell better. This video will show you just how easily you can leverage Qards to sell better!

Why I Like Qards?

I can create an awesome webpage from scratch without having to touch a line of code. Easy to access and modify CSS. The plugin is simple and intuitive to use, even a WordPress newbie shouldn’t find it too difficult to use this plugin.

Qards can be used to create excellent one page websites and I can save each one of those pages. Every time you change your mind, the elements on the pages can be modified and used for entirely new purposes and reordering the content blocks comes in handy.

This drag & drop page builder is ideal to create specific pages for any website. You could use it to present your product and woo customers or investors by displaying your portfolio of work. The builder becomes particularly useful when you need to create specific webpages for very specific purposes.

A ton of choices for me to use and customize my webpages and all of which aren’t complicated to use. Once you get that hang of it, using the plugin comes naturally.

The inline text editor again very useful in predicting the appearance of the webpage as and when I modify text. Same goes for editing code, I can view the preview and choose to keep or get rid off the changes, I don’t have to worry about making a mess of things.

It can save me a great deal of time and effort, that I would otherwise had to have put in creating webpages every time I have a project that requires a special webpage. Qards can save any designer or coder hours and hours of work that can be spent productively creating something else.

One drawback I did find though, it would be nice if I could add images from current media, my WordPress gallery.

Qards Pricing

Qards is priced at a one-time fee of $99 and you’ll get to use it with one website. At $199, you can use it for 5 websites. Given the time you are likely to save with Qards, it is probably worth the money.

Conclusion

Qards is an awesome, intuitive plugin to drag, drop and build beautiful webpages. In any case if you aren’t satisfied with Qards you can always ask for your money back, Design Modo provides a very generous money back guarantee period of 20 days.

Get Qards For WordPress

So – have any of you tried Qards? What were your thoughts on the plugin? We’d love to hear from you!

Customize the look and feel of your website with just a few clicks! CSS Hero is an easy tool that anyone can to add custom fonts, colors, borders, margins and more to your posts and pages. How could something so awesome possibly get better?

How To Customize Your WordPress Site

Up until now you probably thought you had to be a developer to make custom changes to your WordPress site. Not anymore! CSS Hero is a live editable theme customizer giving you the power to create a WordPress site that suits you or your business. We’ll show you how easy it is to customize your website with CSS Hero (as easy as 1, 2, 3), and share some of the many reasons why it’s a great option for you.

1. Get CSS Hero

This is the most important part – you need to grab a copy of CSS Hero! Choose a plan that’s right for you. No matter which plan you choose, you have a year to activate CSS Hero on your website (or websites if you chose a Personal or Pro plan) but then you can make custom changes to your website forever!

2. Make Sure You’re Hero Ready

Before you can get started making changes, you need to be sure you’re using a Hero ready theme. You can see a list of Hero tested themes on the CSS Hero site – and our very own Total theme is about be to announced as Hero ready too!

If you don’t see the theme you want to use don’t be sad – you can still use CSS Hero with any theme! First try using Rocket Mode with your theme. With this enables CSS Hero does it’s best to define the CSS elements in your theme so you can get started customizing. But if this doesn’t work with your theme, you can use the Quick Configure Tool to map our your CSS elements (this just takes a bit more time than the other options).

3. Point, Click & Customize

Now the fun part – customizations! Once you’ve activated CSS Hero on your website you can customize tons of different features. Just hover on page elements to see what can be edited (CSS Hero will highlight elements with a blue box when you hover) and click to start editing.

When you click on an element CSS Hero will show you a list of options (such Text, Background, Border, Padding, Margin, Size, etc.). Just make sure to save when you’re done. And if you want to undo a change that you’ve made, just use the built-in reset options for sections to revert back to the original element settings.

More Features that Make CSS Hero Awesome

There are tons more reasons to love CSS Hero since it really does make it easy for new user and seasoned developers to tweak themes. There are also tons of options built into CSS Hero that you can use for professional changes to your theme. CSS Hero supports modern CSS properties like gradients and box shadows, includes intelligent color picking so you can choose colors from apps (Photoshop, Fireworks, etc) or files on your desktop, and 600+ fonts and glyphs (plus added support for Typekit and third party fonts).

There are also built-in options for editing and customizing responsive displays . While editing just select one of the display options to test how your tweaked theme will work responsively and make additional changes if necessary. It’s a great way to ensure your visitors can read your posts and pages on any device.

And if you spring for the PRO plan you’ll also get the CSS Hero Inspector which gives you the power to use CSS Hero like you would a browser inspection tool. This is a great tool for developers, since it gives you a familiar setting to copy, paste and edit your CSS on the fly.

Oh, and you don’t need to worry at all about CSS Hero slowing down your site. It doesn’t effect the operation of your WordPress installation at all. The plugin only uses resources when you’re using the live editor, so your admin and live site will run as smooth as normal.

CSS Hero, A 5 Star Customizer

We’ve reviewed plenty of builders, but CSS Hero is a customizer. Instead of adding the same page elements as everyone else using the same theme as you, CSS Hero gives you the power to make it more you without having to learn CSS on the weekends.

Get CSS Hero

Hopefully you give CSS Hero a try! It works great with tons of popular themes and plugins, including those from WPMU Dev (hint hint for tomorrow). We really liked trying it out, and we know you will to!

More and more people are using smartphones and tablets every day all over the world. In fact, it’s estimated that by the end of this year, more people will be using their mobile devices to search the web as opposed to desktop internet. All the more reason to make sure your WordPress site is mobile-ready, right? Fail to recognize the strength of the mobile market, and you certainly will miss out on opportunities big and small to reach a larger market of consumers.

Luckily for you, it’s not as technically challenging as you might first think to optimize your site for mobile use. Take a look at the following tips to get your WordPress website up to par with the rest of the mobile-ready web.

Why Does Your WordPress Site Need to be Mobile Ready?

Look around. Just about everyone is carrying around some brand of mobile device. Even kids have them nowadays. Since most people own a mobile phone, chances are they’re reading someone’s blog or website on it. Why not yours? You’ve probably already done your due diligence when it comes to driving traffic to your website, like building up your SEO efforts, for instance. Well, wouldn’t you know it that mobile device optimization falls under that category?

You’ve got to use every channel to get as much traffic as you can. Considering the fact that about 2.7 hours is spent perusing social networks on mobile phones every day by Americans, chances are they’ll be coming across a bunch of different blogs and sites that their friends share.

You always have to be on your toes when it comes to the world of technology and marketing. With scores of people using mobile devices, it’s important for website owners to identify a new avenue for marketing their websites to generate new traffic. And the best way to do that? Mobile optimization, of course! Are you sensing a trend here?

If your site is not optimized to be viewed on a mobile device, it will be tough for your viewers to read your content and view your images. A website needs to be properly optimized specifically for use on the screen sizes that mobile devices have. The screen size and resolution need to be just right. If not, your visitors will find a different website to go to. Over time, this can cost you potential customers.

You want your site to generate traffic. But once they’re there, you want their experience to be a positive one. Having a site that’s ready for mobile use will improve your visitors’ experience and increase your chances of turning them into repeat customers.

Tip #1: Use Mobile-Friendly Themes

In order to keep the theme of your website consistent between desktop and mobile versions, a mobile theme is perfect for you. This way you don’t have to develop one yourself or have to hire someone to do it for you. Along with the increase in mobile device use also comes an increase in the number of mobile themes available. Funny how that works out, huh?

Here’s a few to check out:

• Twenty Fourteen . WordPress’ default theme is actually ideal for many websites. It’s responsive, attractive, and offers numerous menu configurations to fit on any-sized screen.
• Total theme . This top selling theme is a great way to display your website across a variety of mobile devices. Total is fluid responsive, so your page layouts automatically adjust to the browser window. Plus added custom mobile options make it easy to optimize.
• Pineapple . This minimalist WordPress theme is amazing as a theme, which makes use of a mobile responsive design.
• Mayashop . If you’re operating an e-commerce site, the Jigoshop plugin is a great option that works seamlessly with the Mayashop theme. E-commerce sites tend to be a little more challenging to optimize for mobile devices. This theme will help to suit your specific design.

Tip #2: Use Plugins

One of the best things about WordPress is the availability of plugins that make the website owner’s job much easier and more streamlined. Plugins serve a ton of purposes, including helping to make a site mobile friendly.

As a site owner, you’d rather spend your time and effort concentrating on the actual content on your site than all the technical mumbo-jumbo that goes on behind the scenes to make your site function, right? A simple plugin can help to make the content on your site easy to read without having to zoom in a million times or scroll from left to right when trying to read through a paragraph on a phone.

Here are a couple of plugins you might want to check out:

WordPress Mobile Pack . This plugin gives you total control over your website’s mobile version. Domain mapping makes it easy to identify the most popular devices, with a single theme offered in four different color palettes.

WP Mobile Detector. This plugin provides a simple way to optimize your site for mobile devices in no time at all. WP Mobile Detector works with thousands of different smartphones, tablets, web-enabled phones, and so forth, giving your visitor a pleasant experience without you having to spend weeks trying to figure it all out yourself.

Tip #3: Make Your Site Responsive

You’ve most likely visited a responsive website in the past. These types of sites respond appropriately according to the device it’s being viewed on. When being viewed on a desktop, the site is presented one way. When being viewed on a smartphone, it’s presented in another. The same thing happens when viewing the site on a tablet or laptop, or any other mobile device you can get your hands on.

Having a responsive design to your site simply means that it will be customized automatically, no matter what source your viewer is visiting from. Pretty cool, right? Having a responsive website is easy as pie if you’re using WordPress as your site’s platform. All you have to do is find a responsive WordPress theme to suit your website’s style (we can’t stop talking about our fully responsive Total WordPress theme with built-in drag & drop page builder, so you can create any responsive layout you want!).

Tip #4: Minimize Elaborate Graphics

Think about the size of a mobile device’s screen. Granted, they seem to be getting bigger every day, but they’re certainly smaller than the average desktop. Forget filling your website with fancy graphics – too many of them will just cause load times to increase, which is a no-no for mobile surfers.

This is particularly true for e-commerce sites. Shoppers don’t want to be bombarded with graphics to have to sift through. They want to be able to make a purchase quickly and efficiently. So veto the excess graphics and keep it simple.

Tip #5: Choose Text Wisely

In addition to minimizing graphics on your website, you’ll want to minimize text too. Visitors have very limited space on their screens to check out what you’re selling or writing about. Since they’re not likely to zoom in and out or scroll up and down, keep your text razor-focused on what your product is all about.

Forget about all the ‘frills’ that many sellers try to use to garner more attention to their products. Give shoppers only what they need to make an informed purchase.

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Optimizing your WordPress site for mobile devices doesn’t have to be complicated. But it has to be done, no matter what. As a savvy online entrepreneur, you already know that. Anyone with a pair of eyes can see how the mobile world is taking over. So, hopefully these tips will prove helpful.

Have you already made your website mobile friendly? If so, what steps did you take to accomplish this? I’d love to know!

You have four seconds – the exact amount of time you need to create a lasting first impression on your web visitors – to answer this next question. What would you possibly do to differentiate your online business from the myriad other businesses out there? Tick tock…three, two, one. Time’s up.

You probably came up with these among other answers:

• Have the most awesome of products
• Tell a great personal story why you do what is it that you do
• Build a formidable online presence
• Talk to someone over at Finally Famous, Inc, which is a totally fictitious company

Fiction aside, let’s back up to bullet number three on our list; building a formidable online presence. Easier said than done, building an online presence that lets you standout from the crowd involves a couple of factors that tie back to having a great website.

A great website you say? That’s right; your website is, among other things, the face of your online business – your one and only chance to make a great first impression on your prospects. In today’s post, we will reveal 20 tools you can use to customize your WordPress theme to suit your business needs, and lure in clients in trawls. Before the list of tools though, here are a few truths about WordPress theme customization you need to keep in mind as you make changes to your themes.

How to Customize WordPress Themes

If you’ve never customized a WordPress theme before, you might believe it is so complicated a process requiring the brains of a rocket scientist and the resilience of a neurosurgeon. Nothing could be further from the truth. Changing how your WordPress looks and functions is easier than ever before thanks to a wide range of premium WordPress themes that come with advanced theme options. And many themes, like Total , include page builders and customization options built-in so you can create a one of a kind website without using code.

Nevertheless, even with a plethora of options at your disposal, some features and styles are simply not built-in, meaning you have to add them manually. But trying to get anyone with little time or experience to write code manually does not elicit the best of feelings, so what exactly are your options as far as customizing WordPress themes goes?

When looking for the perfect WordPress theme, you can go with a premium theme (such as Total), a free theme or a theme framework depending on your business requirements as well as personal preferences. With a free theme, you don’t put your credit card down but the inadequacy of features and options will make you wish you had. Sure, you can always get plugins for any functionality under the sun, but we all know how that goes.

With premium WordPress themes, you get the features, the looks, the updates and awesome support for a price. Suffice to say, your premium theme of choice might not have all the features and options you need taking you back to square one. A commercial theme framework offers you flexibility, the best web standards, clean code, support etc, but if you don’t know what you’re doing or at least what a child theme is, you’re stuck and won’t achieve much in the area of theme customization or even development.

Surprising enough, using a child theme is the best way of customizing your WordPress theme. We covered WordPress child themes in the past here, so I won’t go into the details, but you should never customize a theme’s files directly to prevent losing all your changes every time you update the theme. Instead you should use a child theme. Child themes allow you to build the site of your dreams based on the parent theme without running the risk of losing your customization when you update.

Using your child theme’s stylesheet file (style.css), you can alter how your entire website looks with a few lines of code. With a special PHP file known as functions.php, you can add features or alter your site structurally. You can go a step further and create template files for your child theme, which gives you absolute control over the design and structure of your theme.

Once your child theme is in place, you can turn your theme whichever way you want, and guess what, you can edit the CSS to some extent right from within your WordPress admin dashboard. However, the changes you can make this way are limited, hence the need for additional tools.

Tools to Customize Your WordPress Theme

The tools we cover in this section range from code editors, FTP clients, code inspectors, image manipulators, and probably everything else that’s the preserve of web developers, web designers and tech-savvy website owners. If you’re the perfect beginner, you will find a few gems as well, but it’s in your best interest to have passing familiarity with HTML, CSS and PHP – the stuff WordPress is made of. With that said, here’s the list of tools you need to customize your WordPress theme fruitfully.

TemplateToaster

One of the easiest options is to use a custom theme creation tool such as the TemplateToaster theme builder . software. With it installed on your computer you have everything you could possibly need to design your own theme.

Use the built-in drag and drop visual builder to create your own template. There are tons of options for columns, headers, custom menus, galleries, widget areas and more. All with no coding required. You can even add content while building your layouts to save time later when you upload the theme to your live site. Plus everything is fully responsive (so there’s no need to worry about styling your site design for different devices), and RTL and multilingual ready. And when you’re all done creating your custom theme with TemplateToaster all you have to do is export it!

Chrome Developer Tools

You have your WordPress theme installed and ready to go, but how do you know exactly which element to customize? If you look at your theme from the front-end, you can’t tell which element is which. The back-end is no better, but thanks to Chrome Developer Tools , you can preview changes to your theme’s structure and CSS, so you can see how they look before coding them. You can visually inspect any element using a point and click approach that makes your work easy. In Google Chrome, you can open Developer Tools by right clicking on the your site and selecting “Inspect Element”.

Notepad++

Customizing your WordPress theme involves (or will involve) writing lots of code. For this, you need a powerful text editor that let’s you stay on top of things. Notepad++ is your best bet since it is easy to use, looks great and comes with plenty of awesome features that will make writing code a whole lot fun.

Sublime Text

Notepad++ works with Windows, but if you need a one-of-a-kind text editor for your Mac computer, Sublime Text is a great choice (it’s what we use here at WPExplorer when coding all of our themes). It comes with distraction free mode, split editing support and allows you to customize anything while switching between projects instantly.

Local Server (WAMP, XAMPP, MAMP, LAMP)

The best and easiest environment to customize (or develop) WordPress themes is a local server. It eliminates the process of logging in and uploading to a live server saving you time and effort. It also means you have complete control over your server to customize it depending on your varying needs. You don’t need to buy hosting space or register domains/create sub domains to customize or develop themes, which is great for your wallet. There are no downtimes or usage caps plus all the other things you hate with your current WordPress host.

To create your own local server, you need programs such as WAMP and XAMPP for Windows, MAMP for Mac OS X, or LAMP for Linux. I use WAMP and it has been awesome so far so good. Would you like to learn how to install WordPress ? Checkout our guide!

Adobe Photoshop

Wait, I’m not a graphic designer. I just want to customize my WordPress theme(s). Can you tell me why I need Adobe Photoshop ? Here is a nice little quote for your pleasure:

[Photoshop] is the defacto standard software for manipulating images. I use it for editing logos, changing colors on background gradients, and tweaking [almost] any image element on a website. – Chris Cree, Web Savvy Marketing.

Now, do you see why you need Adobe Photoshop to customize your WordPress themes? There are so many other things you can do with Photoshop including creating mock ups, picking web colors, saving images for the web etc. Photoshop costs about $20 bucks every month, which is a bit pricey in my world but well worth it.

GIMP

If you’re just starting out and on a tight budget, shelling out $20 bucks a month for Photoshop is something you probably don’t want to do. Enters GIMP and your day and $240 per year is saved. Albeit challenging to set up, GIMP is a worthy alternative to Adobe Photoshop.

GenerateWP

When you start customizing themes, you will need code snippets for various components such as taxonomies, sidebars, custom post types, menus, shortcodes and toolbars just to mention a few. While you can choose to spend hours on end Googling the codes, GenerateWP offers you the easiest and quickest way of creating custom code for your project using the latest WordPress API’s and coding standards. Generate any code you want at the click of a button.

WhatFont

Changing minute details (e.g. fonts) on your theme can have a great effect on the design and user experience. But choosing the perfect font for your WordPress site can be challenging what with the thousands of fonts out there. Worry not though, with the WhatFont tool, you can find out the fonts used in any webpage easily. Just install the WhatFont browser extension, run it and hover on any block of text. Simple as 1, 2, 3.

CSSViewer

The “Inspect Element” tool works great but is it as impressive as the CSSViewer ? That’s a resounding no. While you can’t visually edit the CSS (like in “Inspect Element”), CSSViewer is a simple and intuitive CSS viewer that will make customizing WordPress themes a breeze. All you need to do is install the extension and hover on elements to see a range of CSS properties.

Dummy Content

In most cases, when you acquire a WordPress theme, you receive just that – a blank theme canvas without any content. You can still customize the color and whatnot, but without dummy content, it’s challenging to see if something is amiss. But where from will I get me some cool dummy content? We have your back covered; you can download sample content from Theme Unit Test on the Codex or WordPress Sample Content on WPCandy.

WPBakery (formerly Visual Composer)

A trending item at CodeCanyon at the time of writing, the WPBakery builder is an extremely user-friendly and responsive drag and drop page builder that comes with visual editors among other sweet features. In simpler terms, you can use Visual Composer to build any WordPress page imaginable. Sounds like the tool you want by your side when customizing your WordPress theme, right?

With a responsive design, over 45 content elements, templates, multi-language support and ease of use among other features, Visual Composer is exactly what you need to build the WordPress theme of your dreams. It has over 388,000 sales, an impressive buyer rating of 4.65/5.00 and costs $64 bucks only.

Theme Test Drive

Theme Test Drive is a well-rated plugin by Vladimir Prelovac, a reputable developer with more than 25 plugins under his belt. The plugin does nothing fancy – you just get to “…safely test drive any theme as an administrator , while visitors use the default [theme].”

That’s right, using Theme Test Drive, you can run two themes on your WordPress site at the same time. Of course, your readers will only see one while you customize the other. When logged in, you will only be able to see the theme you’re customizing, allowing you to make changes transparently without the users ever noticing you run a different theme for yourself.

Am I Responsive

As you customize your WordPress theme with new features and styles, you want to see how the customized theme looks and functions on different devices. If you don’t know where to start, Am I Responsive is your answer. Once your are on Am I Responsive website, just add your URL and click the GO! button and that’s that.

Other suitable alternatives include Responsive Design Checker , or the Mobile Responsive Design Testing by StudioPress. You don’t want custom elements to overlap or fall out of line when you change screen width, now do you?

WordPress Theme Customizer

This tool should have been first on this list but hey, who’s keeping count anyway. Fluff aside, WordPress Theme Customizer is an easy-to-use WordPress tool that allows you to customize any theme in a live preview. You can customize everything from the header to menus to colors to widgets and so much more depending on the options available in your theme. To use WordPress Theme Customizer, just navigate to Appearance > Customize in your WordPress dashboard.

CSS Hero

This is an all-in-one web design tool that helps you to customize your WordPress theme easily. Just point and click to edit margins, padding, colors, backgrounds, fonts and add visual effects such as shadows and hover among others. From CSSHero.org , this tool “…is the definitive WordPress plugin to easily customize every property of your themes with an easy and intuitive point and click interface.”

Evernote

Whether you’re customizing your own or a client’s theme, you need a tool to take down notes and track your progress. You can choose to go old school and jot down notes on paper you’ll lose later on, or hop on the Evernote bandwagon and keep your notes organized and synced across your devices. The choice is all yours. The best part? Evernote is free!

FileZilla

During and after customizing your WordPress theme, you need to upload files to your web server. You can use the File Manager feature that comes with your hosting account, or go with FileZilla , the go-to FTP client for many a user. It’s free and compatible with Windows and Mac OS X among others.

FireFTP

This is a great browser extension for WordPress lovers with a thing for Firefox. FireFTP plays well with Firefox, so you can upload/download files right from within your favorite browser without ever downloading a standalone FTP client. On top of that, FireFTP is free, works as advertised and from the numbers, quite the popular tool. In fact, it’s the best web-based FTP tool!

Basecamp

If you customize themes for a living, you obviously have projects running head to head. If you fail to track your work, things will go haywire eventually, something you definitely don’t want. Basecamp costs between $25 and $150 a month, and is the best tool to “…assign tasks, check due dates, collaborate on projects, shares files and have discussions.” Basecamp offers a 60-day free trial, so don’t be scared to give it a test run – they won’t ask for your credit card.

ActiveCollab

If Basecamp is not to your taste, ActiveCollab is an impressive alternative. With a host of awesome features and starting at just $25 per month, ActiveCollab offers you all the tools you need to stay on top of any project, not just theme customization.

Over to You…

If you’re yet to start customizing WordPress themes, it’s easy especially now that you have more than 20 awesome tools to make your work easier and fun. If you’re not comfortable coding we recommend using a feature rich theme like Total to make customizations. If you do customize WordPress themes, which other tools do you use? If you liked this post, please share your thoughts with us as well, we always look forward to your feedback. Ad astra.

In short? Yes. But that doesn’t make for a very exciting post, now does it? Still, it’s the truth and if you’re serious about WordPress, you can benefit enormously from attending local events. I’m going to spend some time today going over the benefits of attending and what you can expect to get out of the experience as a whole.

General Benefits

First, you might be surprised by how many movers-and-shakers you’ll get to meet at conferences like these. As WordCamp brags , “It’s not uncommon to meet…speakers who are featured at expensive web industry conferences like South by Southwest.”

And while many conferences won’t attract big names, sometimes what you do get is even better. You get to meet all kinds of web designers and developers working on all kinds of projects, many of whom live right in your town.

And even at events without the star power, it’s worth going just to experience your local WordPress community in its most “real” and passionate form. These events are primarily run and attended by local people who really care about WordPress, and there’s no way to quantify the benefit of immersing yourself in an environment full of people who’ve all come together for a purpose you’re interested in.

Don’t be scared if you’re not experienced enough, however. Most of these events go out of their way to welcome people of all skill levels. In fact, if you’re new to WordPress, attending a gathering with people who make their living off of it may be just the motivation you need to take your work to the next level.

And don’t confuse these with one of your typical stodgy, corporatized business events. Most conferences even feature afterparties and networking events that will let you get to know your fellow attendees in an even more informal setting. Need more reasons? You got it!

Networking

Not only will you gain information from other people, you get to give it out yourself. If you’re a dev or website builder, what better way to advertise your services than one-on-one interaction with people you know are interested? It’s a surefire way to drum up business.

If you do plan on networking, make sure to get your ducks in a row, first. That means having your portfolio with your best works sorted out in advance and posted somewhere with an easy-to-remember URL that you can tell people about. That means getting business cards printed if you haven’t done so already. And it also means working on your introduction and elevator pitch in advance so you’re not stumbling over your words when it’s time to sell your services.

Finding Work

This ties into networking but merits its own section just the same. Most of the work opportunities you find at conventions will be through one-on-one conversations with people who need help with their projects. It is through this real, face-to-face interaction that you have the chance to really appeal to prospective clients and use your personality to win them over.

But even if this kind of interaction isn’t your thing, many conferences post Job Boards, giving you a better overview of the WordPress development and web design opportunities in your area than you could get even by browsing the online variety of the same. It’s specialized, focused, and tailor-made for those in attendance.

Lectures

Conferences, like most trade shows, offer noted experts in both developing and using WordPress. These experts give lectures discussing how they’ve built the careers and how they do what they do. The ability to see how they persevere through certain challenges, or how they go through their work process, is invaluable.

You might even end up learning about aspects of web design you never thought to study before. Someone who’s an expert in the entire process may end up revealing that the key to a problem you’ve been having is in a place you would have never thought to look. For example, if you’ve always been more focused on the technical side of web development, it may help to attend presentations on how more traditional methods of graphic design can be applied to WordPress. And that’s just one example. There are so many others!

Talking Shop

But don’t think it’s just the featured presentations that you’re coming for – you can learn a lot about your trade just by talking to your fellow attendees. Many of them may end up being just as knowledgeable as the people behind the podiums, and if you’re lucky, you may find a new mentor or collaborator.

There’s no better way to learn any skill than one-on-one interaction. Working in isolation can be far more difficult than when you have someone on-hand to help you. Events like these will often help you make friends that can be those sources of support later down the road.

Information on New Features

You can get live demonstrations of the latest updates to WordPress and its plugins at local events, too. You’ll also find yourself exposed to aspects of WordPress and features that you may never have thought to use, or third-party frameworks that you would have never seen explained.

How Do I Find These Events?

WordCamp, the biggest name when it comes to WordPress conventions, holds tens of events all over the world, negating the need to justify spending hundreds on travelling to the other side of the country to attend one. The full WordCamp schedule can be found on their website.

One of the most interesting features at WordCamp events is the Genius Bar – yes, just like the one at the Apple Store – that operates for the duration of the conference and provides a one-stop shop for all your WP-related questions.

WordCamp events are generally pretty affordable – usually within the range of $40-$60 for the whole weekend – and at that price, I can almost guarantee you’ll see a massive return on your investment.

If you’d like to start smaller, you can attend a local meetup instead of a conference. They happen much more often and more regularly anyway, so you might want to start with one for that reason alone. Also, they’re usually free – the WordPress Foundation pays the organizer dues for many of them, meaning they don’t have to pass the costs on to you. So if you want a preview of your local WordPress scene without having to shell out any dough for it, you can check one of them out.

There are over 1,500 WordPress Meetup Groups worldwide, too. Chances are, there’s one in the nearest population center to your home. As an aside, one of the most interesting features of the Meetup is they can be themed. For example, many Meetup groups will have events specifically to preview particularly exciting new features, or to develop certain types of apps. So, if there’s a specific topic you’re interested in, make sure to monitor the meetup schedules to see if it’s coming up soon.

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Really, if you have any interest in WordPress beyond the hobbyist stage, there’s no reason not to attend at least a meetup. And truly, you should attend WordCamp events, too. I can’t recommend them enough.

Any WordPress meetup or convention-related information you want to share? Did I miss something? Or maybe you have a fun WordCamp memory or advice you;d like to share? Let me know in the comments!

WordCamp Images: Morten Rand-Hendriksen , Eva Blue , Josh Hallett