From a Purchased Theme to a Design That Reads Your Account
Most designs in the catalog begin life as a purchased theme. A theme is a set of HTML pages with a stylesheet, sold to whoever wants it, and in that state it is not a design you could use. It is a demonstration. Turning one into something an actor can pick is a real piece of work, and it is worth knowing what that work is.
What a theme actually ships as
A theme arrives as a folder of static pages built to sell the theme. There is usually a chooser page comparing six home page variants. There are pages for whatever industry the author had in mind: a shop, an album listing, an events calendar, a pricing table. The text is placeholder copy about a fictional freelancer. Nothing in it knows that a customer exists.
So the parts that make it a website for you are exactly the parts a theme does not come with.
What porting involves
Three things, and the third is the one that takes the time.
The markup is reduced to the pages an actor needs. The chooser, the shop, the album listing and the events calendar are not carried across, because an actor's site has no use for them and every page that stays is a page that has to keep working.
The stylesheet is rebuilt around the pages that remain, rather than kept whole. A theme's stylesheet carries rules for everything it ever offered, and several hundred of those rules can describe components that will never appear on an actor's website.
Then every piece of text and every image on the page is wired to a field in your account. Your name, your headshots, your credits, your contact details, your accent color. This is the step that turns a demonstration into a design, and it is why how a design reads your account is worth reading alongside this.
What you get as a result
Sections appear when your account has something to put in them and stay out of the way when it does not. An actor with no press coverage does not get an empty press heading. The accent color follows whatever you picked under Website and then Design, rather than being baked into the theme's original palette.
Each design also keeps its own character. One is a fixed side menu beside a full-height hero. Another is a dark stage with a full-bleed photograph. That is the reason to have a catalog at all rather than one layout with a color picker.
Choosing one
Every design is checked before it ships, which is covered in how every design is checked, and the text on the page is your own, which is covered in your own words on every design.
Some designs are not ported themes at all but built here from scratch, such as Modernist and VoiceNow. You can preview any of them before committing. Browse the catalog or create a free actor website.
