How themes work

A theme decides how your help centre looks, and most of what people want is settings rather than code. A theme you have edited is yours to maintain.

A theme decides how your help centre looks, and most of what people want is settings rather than code. A theme you have edited is yours to maintain.

The three levels

• Settings. Colours, fonts, logo, what appears on the home page. No code, and enough for most help centres.
• Editing the code. Templates and stylesheets, for changes the settings do not reach.
• A custom theme. Built from scratch or bought, for a help centre that must match a designed site exactly.

Start with settings

Your logo, your colours and a sensible home page get you a help centre that looks like your company. That covers what most organisations need, and it survives Zendesk's own updates without maintenance.

What editing code costs

A customised theme is yours to maintain. Zendesk improves the standard themes; a copy you have edited does not receive those improvements, and reapplying them is manual.

Worth it when the design genuinely matters. Not worth it to move a heading.

The version that is live

You can hold up to ten themes, the standard one included, and exactly one is live. That makes it safe to work on a new one, because nothing changes for readers until you publish it.

A new theme starts one of four ways: a copy of the standard Copenhagen theme, a duplicate of one you already have, an imported theme file, or one pulled from GitHub. The first two are the sane starting points; the last is how a team that keeps its theme in version control works.

Check it on a phone

A meaningful share of help centre traffic is mobile, often somebody standing in front of the problem. A theme that looks right on a wide screen and cramped on a phone is the wrong way round.

See also

• Choosing and customising a theme
• Editing a theme's code
• My theme change is not showing