There are a lot of requests for customizations outside the scope of the tutorials and basic theme setup. Our themes are designed to facilitate food blogging, and we've tried to codify this in our Principles and Policies.
The most important question to ask is: Why do I want to do this?
Is it because I feel it needs to be done for some whimsical reason, or is there a compelling business purpose (eg. increased conversion rate, more visitor time on site, visitor feedback)?
If you can't come up with a clear justification for paying a programmer $125/hour to make this change, you probably shouldn't do it.
The most important question to ask is: Why do I want to do this?
There's a lot that is relatively simple to do yourself, but you'll need to get your hands dirty with HTML+CSS - there are a thousand things you may want to change at some point, and learning how to do the basics is a must.
If it's a fairly simple change that you want to learn to do it yourself, then we recommend starting with our guide at https://feastdesignco.com/how-to/use-inspect-element-troubleshoot/
And going through the freecodecamp.com lessons: https://www.freecodecamp.org/challenges/say-hello-to-html-elements
If you want us to proceed with an unsupported customization, reach out to us to see if a "60 Minute Customization" will cover the scope of work. Please note that these customizations don't include fixes/corrections to follow-on errors that occur.
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You don't know what you don't know
Why is there a minimum margin and padding around certain things? What accessibility considerations were incorporated into the original layout and design? Were you aware that there are certain accessibility requirements for text color and links? See: https://webaim.org/resources/linkcontrastchecker/
There are hundreds of decisions that go into designs, which get reviewed each year, and modified and changed as needed. If you're not a professional designer, you probably shouldn't be playing with designs.
Consider the long term consequences
Many parts of the theme structure is tied to the dimensions, and like pulling a spider web, it will throw off the rest of the page. This can result in having to rewrite parts of the website, modify the styles.css, the "Additional CSS" in the customizer, and the functions.php file. This can cause headaches on a stock theme install, and becomes exponentially more difficult as plugins and customizations are added.
Note: do ever edit functions.php. Use the code snippets plugin to change any functionality/coding.
Another factor to consider is how you will deal with updates that require overwriting the files you've changed. It's not only child themes that get updated - the Genesis framework and WordPress core itself is constantly evolving, and our theme files are updated to stay compatible with those.
If you've made customizations, you'll have to figure out how to copy those updates over on your own.
Use the code snippets plugin when making coding changes, which stores your customizations outside of the child theme files.
Unsupported Customizations
Below is a list of things we've been asked to customize, which shouldn't be changed without a very clear and compelling reason, with a tangible benefit:
- page width
- pagebuilders
- sidebar width and alignment
- header height
- header right widget areas
- font sizes
- search removal