Build Your Blog With MD Part 1: An Introduction & Philosophy

I’ve decided to create a post series here on Kolakube to teach you how to customize Marketers Delight with a WordPress Child Theme.

The benefits of using a Child Theme to customize your site is that you have full access to all the templates and files that make up Marketers Delight under-the-hood. This means you can change anything on your website.

Now, I know many of you are going to cringe at the idea of working with templates and files because this means you’ll be working with code.

Truthfully, coding isn’t as big of a nightmare as many software companies market it to you as. From years of selling themes, I’ve learned how my customers like to customize their sites and built Marketers Delight in a way that is familiar to experienced developers and easy to pick up for beginners.

If you invest just a few hours upfront leaning the guts of Marketers Delight and how to use a Developer Tool like in Google Chrome (or other browsers), you’ll be able to make all kinds of changes to your website with ease.

You’ll be amazed at how far just a little coding knowledge will go. While tools like drag and drop page builders certainly can make things easier, the skills and knowledge you learn are non-transferrable.

If you learn code, you’ll find that you can bring your experience anywhere regardless of how the website is built. Think of it as a one-time investment that goes towards learning the true language websites speak.

That language is not drag and drop, it’s code. The goal of this series is to show you that MD makes coding websites with WordPress easy for anybody to understand.

While MD has everything you need out of the box to create a beautiful blog and setup email signup forms, changing how anything looks or works does require code. If coding to make changes to your site just really isn’t something you can do, then MD may not be for you right now.

Who am I to make these claims about coding?

I’ve been building websites for a long time and quickly found that I could never find a tool that I was truly satisfied with out of the box. I even use Marketers Delight here on Kolakube and I still saw things I wanted to change! So I made some tweaks of my own.

You’ll most likely find that to be the case too. The goal of a product like MD is to provide you a with focused solution. I can build features I know you need, but you’re the only one who knows what they should look like on your website.

I learned this for myself after spending hours tweaking the typography, spacing, fonts, and other design elements on all of my websites. I never found something that took perfect care of those things to my own liking and grew tired of doing this over and over again when all I wanted to do was write.

Now that I have MD, I don’t have to worry about those meticulous details (and neither do you!). Keep in mind that despite the fact that I build MD and other products the reason I’m here is to write, just like you.

See, I’ve spent thousands of hours formulating my own development theories and writing and rewriting code to find the simplest answers to common problems I’d run into during the customization process.

On the outside, MD is a tool built to my preferences of how websites I create to share my art and create an income should be built. Under-the-hood are coding techniques I use to make customizations as easy and fast as possible.

I won’t only show you code, but I’ll help you understand the thought process behind it. See, coding isn’t all about syntax but also logical problem-solving. If you can think logically, then you can code.

A Quick Course Overview

Here are the topics that I’ll cover in these series. Each item will be a separate blog post:

1. How to Setup a Child Theme And Basic Principles
   This post will explain how the MD Child Theme works and the basic concepts of a child theme, including overwriting template files and using conditional tags.
2. Using Hooks, Filters, and Template Functions (With Examples)
   A list of hooks and filters included in MD with examples of how to use them to add/remove elements from your site.
3. CSS Style Guide
   Use this style guide to easily add responsive components to your posts and pages including columns, colored boxes, buttons, icons, etc.

Depending on how you guys like these posts, I’ll be doing more teaching tutorials to help you better understand the inner workings of Marketers Delight.

See you soon with the first issue in this series. If you want to be alerted of the next issue, join the free email list and I’ll send it right to you.