How long will it take to set up my theme?

It depends. 

If you’ve already been blogging for some time and have menus, pages, and lots of posts published to your site, theme setup can be pretty fast. Our Customizer will inherit all of that content, so it’s simply a matter of customizing the various feeds and features of your site, and pointing widgets, menus, and other features where you want them to go. 

Someone extremely adept at WordPress, with strong photo editing capabilities, ample experience with customizing themes from different vendors, and who had months of content to pull from, could probably get the entire theme customized in 60 minutes. However, bear in mind that customers creating lots of new images and graphics for widgets and interstitials should budget in more time for customization. (Just like with blog posts, photo editing for these features is often very time consuming!)  

Overall? If you've already been blogging, we'd allocate anywhere from 3-5 hours from start to finish, just in case. But of course, you can do this in pieces, too (see below for advice on a Coming Soon page!).

Remember, customizing your theme is an extremely personal thing—some people like a minimal look, and don't want a ton of extra sidebar or interstitial features, so this will reduce setup time significantly. If you plan on going all-in and adding tons of extra features, expect to spend more time.

ARE YOU A BRAND NEW BLOGGER?

If you are brand new to blogging and have no content yet published to your site, don’t worry! You can customize everything and begin blogging, just note that some features may not appear because there’s no content to fill out those spaces.

For example, if you add a category widget to a sidebar, but have yet to publish content within a particular category, nothing would show up. You may find it a little bit harder to visualize what content will look like within the Customizer environment, simply because there’s no content to look at.

Good news: To help with setup, we've provided some guidelines on how to quickly create "dummy content" on your site, so that you can customize as if you already had lots of posts published! Check it out here.

COMING SOON PAGES

If you’re uncomfortable with launching a site without enough content, one great option is to implement a Coming Soon page. This allows you to create content behind the scenes and get the site customized to your exact specifications, while still giving you a URL to direct people to. We recommend the Seed Prod Pro Coming Soon Page and Maintenance Mode plugin. Learn more about how to set up this plugin here.