2014 WordPress Themes not what they may seem

I have set-up a number of WordPress sites for non-profits, or people with low budgets, via WordPress.com with no problem – easy and fast.

But now I am setting up a WordPress Template site via a host company and was surprised at the number of plugins that need to be installed simply to have a site look and or act the same as theme creator[s] state.

One theme I came across and liked was Nirvana, but as it turned out I was not pleased with the size of images it produced and what seem to be endless tweaks to make it acceptable to my liking.

So I switched to Twenty Fourteen however, it also was not perfect either. I am especially surprised at the number of request from people who want to get rid of the left sidebar and have the ability to center their website.

I wonder why WordPress Theme developers did not provide a simple solution to this in their latest theme update?

After finding what I thought was the answer to correct this with the use of Fourteen Extended plugin I subsequently found out that it’s no longer available.

After viewing a few different videos my conclusion was that the only option was to create a Child Theme, and in my quest to find a simple solution I did a plugin search using “child” as the keyword. This brought up a new plugin called “child theme configurator”.

It’s fairly new and after viewing the developer’s video my conclusion is that I will download it, if only to have a backup of my site. But as for anyone starting out this plugin may seem somewhat daunting as people still have to know and understand a bit about coding in order to avoid errors.

My thoughts about WordPress sites is that they are branded on users ability to embellish templates with ease and fairly quickly.

So in conclusion I can not help but wonder why WordPress did not build into this theme the ability to delete the left hand sidebar and center the template.

Regards…layoutscribe