There has quite probably never been a better time to be a premium theme user. While a huge increase in the supply of quality premium themes hasn’t particularly driven down prices, it has promoted a huge push for innovation, best practices and quality design. Unfortunately, there’s one crucial thing which rarely gets quite so much attention as the must have responsive design: after-sales support.

Sadly, all too often, documentation is seriously lacking, and getting a reply on the developer’s support forum or via email takes much longer than it should. This post aims to take the pain out of using a premium WordPress theme by sharing some tips I’ve learned in my time as a “support expert” for a major theme shop.

WordPress' popularity has grown exponentially as of late. This rise in popularity is due in part to WordPress' custom fields. Custom fields allow you to add little bits of data to posts. They have changed the way people look at WordPress. A couple of years ago, WordPress was a blogging platform — a good one, but a blogging platform nonetheless. Now it's widely considered to be an excellent simple content management system. How did it evolve so quickly? Custom fields, that's how.

How exactly did these bits of data transform WordPress? The fields could initially include the weather — as the codex points out — the temperature and various other not-particularly-useful things. And that was the story for a while. Then people started to realize that they could use the custom fields to store URLs of images. They could then pull these images to the home page to create magazine-style layouts. These magazine themes, as they became known, evolved, and eventually you were able to pull images automatically from posts. You can draw a direct line from WordPress' popularity to the magazine themes to custom fields.