As a general rule of thumb, themes that are Woocommerce compatible will look better than themes that are not. This is because creators of Woocommerce compatible themes have already stylized Woocommerce components such as the product page, cart system and checkout, as opposed to non-Woocommerce themes where you would have to stylize such pages yourself in order for your website to look balanced and aesthetically pleasing. A level of proficiency in formatting webpages using CSS is required to stylize webpages. If you are not familiar with using code to alter webpages, we recommend using a Woocommerce compatible theme, otherwise you may need to utilize the assistance of a professional programmer to beautify your storefront.

Certain Woocomerce themes are created for particular types of products. For example, a Woocommerce theme made for selling travel packages may not perfectly fit the needs of a photographer who needs to display different image licenses and sizes on each product page. Themes that cater to visual media products, and which have stylized product purchasing options (such as dropdowns where the customer selects a product variant) would be a much more suitable.

We recommend you opt to use Symbiostock Express which is a theme developed by the Symbiostock team which optimizes the look and feel of your store for media sales, and is used by most Symbiostock users. Most theme vendors display demo versions of the themes they sell and it is recommended that you investigate theme demos before purchasing a theme. If you do not want to spend much on setting up a store, or you simply want to experiment with Symbiostock before making more of a commitment, consider using a free theme by Woothemes or use Google to search for other no-cost theme options.

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To change your theme follow instructions found on WordPress theme support.

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Editing the theme itself

For experienced users, you can go in and edit the theme itself – if you are familiar with PHP you can change how it looks right at the core, making it your own. This is usually done by editing the ‘functions.php’ file included in your theme’s root folder. This is a complex option and is probably not suitable for most users.

Using the Admin Panel

The best method of personalizing your theme is to alter it from within your WordPress administrative panel. You can do this in one of three ways (or a combination of them).

Appearance > Customize Panel

The first is to go to Appearance > Customize. This is generally a basic method of changing certain elements in your page and you should generally start here to see if something easy can be changed using this interface.

Generally, however, this section of theme customization is pretty limited so you won’t be able to get all you want done this way.

Theme provided customizations

Another method of customizing your theme will be provided directly from your theme – some themes come with their own customizers, and these are generally much more detailed and large in their scope. Symbiostock Express, for example, adds a unique item to your dashboard with a large menu of ways in which you can completely transform the way your site looks.

Custom CSS

In addition to theme provided customizations, this is a good method. Some themes provide Custom CSS panels built in, or you can download a third party plugin that allows you to add Custom CSS (here is a free plugin that does this). With this powerful box, you can add any CSS you want which will override everything on your site. You can remove elements, change fonts, colors, sizes, background images – pretty much everything. We recommend keeping this box open in one browser window, and keeping your store open in another. Every time you make a change, refresh the store window to see the result. This is the easiest way of seeing your changes, and helps in teaching you how to use CSS quickly and effectively.

A good trick to use images with your CSS code is to upload any images you want to use, such as backgrounds, icons, buttons, to your main Media tab (not Symbiostock > Media) which is found under your ‘Posts’ tab. After uploading, you will see a ‘URL’ field to the right – this is now the location of your uploaded file, and you can use this to reference that image anywhere in your CSS.

There are many free tutorials online regarding CSS. As CSS is the most widely used (if not, the only used) method of stylizing websites, personalizing your Symbiostock site will give you a complimentary opportunity to learn a valuable skill.

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Some of these types of plugins may include SEO, statistics, payment modules, tax modules, and security modules, to name a few. We recommend not installing too many, however, as enabling many plugins that are not necessary can sometimes slow down your website substantially. Also ensure that you acquire plugins from reputable sources as plugins go through no specific quality control to be distributed, and may have bugs and/or exploits that could compromise your entire server.

You can discuss and ask about various third party plugins on the Symbiostock forums.

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Once the plugin is installed, all you have to do is activate it, and the notice will go away. If you don’t want to see the notice, no matter what, you can safely dismiss it permanently assuming the plugin in question provides you a means to do that.

Symbiostock Pro comes bundled with certain WooCommerce and WooThemes notification removals as some of their software does not come with an easy way of removing them.

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To access this feature, go to Symbiostock > Settings. Within that, scroll down to URL Redirection. There, you enter as many desired redirects as you want for your site.

The syntax is as follows:

“/old-path/“>”/new-path/“,”/old-path1/“>”/new-path1/”

For example, if your old URL was:

http://www.mydomain.com/index.php/myimage123/

and your new URL is:

http://www.mydomain.com/store/images/myimage123/

the proper syntax for redirection would be:

“/index.php/“>”/store/images/”

Be sure to be as all inclusive as possible in your redirects. This means including forward slashes so that the URL redirect does not catch unwanted pages.

For example, if your old URL was:

http://www.mydomain.com/image/myimage123/

and your new URL is:

http://www.mydomain.com/store/myimage123/

and you put the URL redirect as: “image“>”store”

it would work for the above URL. But it would also convert:

http://www.mydomain.com/how-to-format-images/

to:

http://www.mydomain.com/how-to-format-stores/

Therefore, the safer way to do it would be: “/image/“>”/store/“.

You can also redirect whole pages such as:

http://www.mydomain.com/this-is-my-whole-page/page/1/

to:

http://www.mydomain.com/this-is-the-new-one

with:

“/this-is-my-whole-page/page/1/“>”/this-is-the-new-one”

You can have as many as you want, separated by commas:

“/redirect1/“>”/newurl1/“,”/redirect2/“>”/newurl2/“,”/redirect3/“>”/newurl3/”

The redirect utility will only make one replacement in the URL, and it will only do the first one, starting from everything after the base domain. Additionally, it performs a 301 redirect to be more search engine friendly. This means the page has been moved permanently to the new one.

Finally, for more complex redirection, you can use other facilities such as editing your htaccess file or trying a 3rd party WordPress plugin.

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