Pro Tips
Some amazing people have offered up these Pro Tips from their experiences to help you get started on the right track. You can ignore this page if you prefer to learn the hard way and figure out everything yourself without any help.
Geno Quiroz of Monterey Premier
Think of a premium Divi Child Theme like a Divi Layout Kit on steroids. Instead of keeping all the customization within the various modules, sections, and page layouts, try to put as much of the overall color schemes, font sizes, and general “style” within the Customizer settings and the child theme files. This allows the end user to make more global changes to the overall style that is currently not possible with the Divi builder. We add new Customizer settings specific to the theme and cannot be packaged in a standard Divi Layout Kit. The key is to use custom classes for all the Divi sections, rows and modules so that the end user is never locked into a particular module’s Customizer settings.
Tim Strifler of Divi Life
Make sure you “clean house” on your demo site before exporting your content to avoid adding unneeded content to your export file. Remove any images you decided not to use, as well as any unneeded test pages, posts, custom post types, and only select the post types you need from the “Additional Options” menu. Clean and lightweight is the name of the game!
Josh Rohrback of MAGI Web Design
Create detailed documentation for your customers. After a year with our first child theme on the market, we’ve had to spend very little time on customer support despite our products’ popularity. This is due in large part to our detailed step-by-step installation guide, as well as troubleshooting guides implemented after solving edge-case support requests. Issues with one particular host? Document it. In this way, most support requests can be directed to your documentation – saving you time and money.
Michelle Nunan of Divi Soup
If you are using licensed stock images in your child theme demos, you can’t distribute those images with your actual child theme.
Instead use a free tool like placeholder.com to replace your images and add the image sizes you used so customers can see at a glance what size images they should be uploading.
You can even add text and change the background and text colours of the placeholder to match your theme. Super useful!
Tammy Grant of Brand Elemental
Your child theme package folder is your gift to the customer. Inside should be packed with resources for their success. In addition to the child theme zipped folder and instructions, we include a comprehensive exports folder in each package that includes items such as Divi Page Layout, Caldera Forms and Bloom .json files. While these are automatically installed with Easy Demo Import Pro, we discovered some of our customers delete these items after installation then request them again. By giving them backups, you will save time in support requests.
Brant Barton of The Coaching Marketplace
Be as clear and concise as possible! Keep in mind that many users aren’t web developers. So what can you do? Make sure page names are consistently referenced on the page title and menu item. Change admin labels on modules to clearly reference what the module is for on the front end. Even regular Divi users (including myself) can be easily confused by just looking at a slew of unlabeled modules. Lastly, make sure your instructions are simple, but explanatory! It never hurts to accompany your instructions with pictures, or even a video!
