At The WordPress Helpers, one of our favorite theme vendors is Elegant Themes. They turn out beautiful work, give great support, and publish a daily blog post about WordPress that stands head-and-shoulders above many others.

When we came across the story you see below, imploring that WordPress developers document their work, we knew we needed to chime in with a hearty yes, please!. Difficult or missing documentation is one of the biggest reasons The WordPress Helpers exists, and we were looking for exactly the right way to illustrate the issue in a discussion about that piece.

Then Google gave it to us: several weeks from now, websites that don’t play nice on mobile devices will start losing SEO juice, and GOOG sent us a note that our parent company’s site was about to get hit.

Since the PC-VIP.COM web site acts mostly as a sort of Internet holding company, we didn’t want to put a lot of time into redesign. The previous version of the site did some interesting programming tricks, and as a result getting it transitioned to a current-generation theme builder—or even a wonderful, simple theme like Simply Read—was more challenging than we liked.

Knowing we wanted little more than a showcase for the PC-VIP service lines, we selected Nova, one of Elegant’s offerings from several years ago that does everything we need, and adheres to the Responsive needs of a current-generation website. Nova remains a decent choice for a full website despite its age.

And yet the new PC-VIP website just barely looks like the demo Nova site:

We actually know how to do this stuff, of course, so had we needed to we could have taken things beyond changing the logo and removing the menus. And to their credit, Elegant provides reasonable WordPress theme documentation such that someone who wanted a web site that looks more like the Nova demo than what we created does could make it happen if they plowed through the process.

That said: EngageWP’s point is … critical. Code documentation in general and WordPress Theme Documentation in particular is almost as important as the theme itself.

<center>The WordPress Helpers: Making WordPress Work</center>

Article Title:

Elegant Themes Nova WordPress Theme Documentation

Subject:

Documentation matters. WordPress Theme Documentation is crucial. How much? Absent great WordPress theme documentation your WordPress theme can be .... ugly.

Author:

The WordPress Helpers