As I’ve shared a few times before, I am not a developer. But that doesn’t mean that I do not enjoy building websites; it means that I am limited to the options that themes and plugins have built-in. I am not able to do a lot of customisations (play with the code).
I’ve set up quite a few websites with limited knowledge and with most themes you have to go through the themes menu in the backend, then save the settings and then refresh the page in a different tab in order to see the changes. That’s quite a long and frustrating process, especially if you’re figuring out what you like and what you want.
Visual Customisation
For people like me, companies that use the WordPress Customiser for their themes are being smart. They make the experience of giving personal character to a website fun and simple; you change a setting and instantly you see the result. If you don’t like what you see, you go back to the previous setting or you just don’t save your modifications. Easy peasy.
I’m happy to see that WooThemes’ themes strategy has started applying this approach. Not only for our Storefront theme, but also for extensions that let you further customise the theme. Because the WP Customiser lets you go further than just changing a header; you can change templates, widgets, images, fonts and so on. With some good code and some good focus almost the entire design can be altered, but without the tedious and annoying process of saving the changed settings and refreshing the frontend.
Customer Support
It also results in simplifying customer support. While with most of our themes, we have to explain in detail what almost every single option in the backend can do, people have less questions for us when we rely on the Customiser; they can see for it themselves.
Using the WP Customisers makes it easier for n00bs like me to build a website, it makes it more fun and I have less questions for the theme developer. So what are other companies waiting for? I honestly don’t know.
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