Working with Themes
What are Themes?
Themes are what drives the design of your JoyBird website.
Think of themes as being separate from your content - the first is how you are presented, and the second is what you are sharing with your website visitors.
Every JoyBird website is configured with a theme, from amongst the many design themes we offer.
Depending on which theme you select, your website can look vastly different even with the same pages, text, and images!
Parts of a Theme
Every theme comes with a pre-built design which includes:
One or more Brand Palettes, which are the combinations of colors and fonts giving your website its distinct look.
Layouts, which control how site-wide elements like navigation menus and footers are displayed.
Page Templates, which control how elements on each page (for example, the page title, main text, any image galleries, contact forms, etc) are displayed.
Page Templates
Page Templates are a critical element in all themes.
Each theme will have a minimum of 3 core page templates:
Homepage - the main gateway to your website, often with sections like a hero image, image galleries, and serving as an introduction to you or your business.
Single - most of your website pages will use this template. It is the base format for displaying any content, such as an About Me page, a blog article, or an ecommerce store's product page.
Collection - used to present a preview of other pages within your website. Some examples could be:
A Latest News page which lists links to separate news articles.
A Product Category page which lists links to each product in that category.
A Blog Tag page which lists all blog posts with a particular tag.
Some themes may contain other templates, but we find that most websites work well with these 3 basic templates.
Changing Themes
To change your theme, navigate to the Themes tab in your admin dashboard.
From there, you can simply select any available theme.
There are two issues to be careful of here.
Unsupported Page Templates
As well as the 3 core page templates (homepage, single, and collection), some themes may have additional custom page templates.
If you are changing from a theme with a custom page template to a theme which does not support an equivalent custom template, any pages using that custom template will default to the core Single Page template.
Site Rebuilding
Changing themes changes the look of your website significantly.
Therefore when you change themes, your website will be rebuilt.
This often takes 1 - 3 minutes, and you may need to refresh your browser cache to see any changes.