There are numer­ous ben­e­fits of brand­ing your Freshdesk sup­port site. Using pre-exist­ing tem­plates – ready-made Freshdesk themes – is one of the ways you can cus­tomize your self-help sup­port por­tal. Anoth­er, more advanced method, is brand­ing your Freshdesk site using a cus­tom Freshtheme. In the fol­low­ing arti­cle, you will learn every­thing you need to know about Freshdesk themes and how to use them successfully.

What are Freshdesk Themes or FreshThemes?

A Freshdesk theme is a cus­tomiz­able tem­plate, which you can use to exten­sive­ly change the appear­ance of your Freshdesk por­tal. The com­plete Freshdesk theme con­tains 17 files. Using the files, you can change dif­fer­ent parts or dif­fer­ent pages of your sup­port site. For exam­ple, you can use Footer.txt file to cus­tomize the foot­er or Login.txt file to cus­tomize the login page.

Files contained in a complete theme:

1. Stylesheet.txt
2. Header.txt
3. Footer.txt
4. Pagelayout.txt
5. Portalhome.txt
6. NewUser.txt
7. Login.txt
8. SearchRe­sults
9. SolutionHome.txt
10. ArticleList.txt
11. ArticleView.txt
12. SolutionsCategoryHome.txt
13. TopicList.txt
14. TopicView.txt
15. Discussionshome.txt
16. NewTopic.txt
17. New Ticket.txt

Some FreshThemes are not com­plete; they do not include all files, which means you can­not use them to change the appear­ance of the whole sup­port por­tal, but rather spe­cif­ic parts of the portal.

How to use Freshdesk themes

Freshdesk themes are free to use for all Freshdesk users who have the Gar­den, Estate or For­est plan. You can pre­view and down­load the themes in the FreshThemes Gallery. Users with the Graden plan can use the stylesheet ele­ments, while users with the For­est plan can use all files exact­ly as they are. Only users with the Estate plan can cus­tomize the themes com­plete­ly, to bet­ter fit their cor­po­rate branding.

How to use a ready-made Freshdesk theme

Usu­al­ly, the themes are pret­ty sim­ple to set­up, though some themes can be more com­pli­cat­ed than oth­ers. After you choose the theme you wish to use, from the FreshThemes gallery, it is impor­tant to check the README.TXT file, right after down­load­ing the theme. There may be spe­cial instruc­tions regard­ing images or JavaScript files, and if you miss fol­low­ing these instruc­tions, the theme won’t work the way you are expecting.

pur­plenote: If you decide to use a ready-made Freshdesk theme, feel free to mod­i­fy the theme to bet­ter fit your brand iden­ti­ty, but it would be nice to leave a ref­er­ence to the contributor.

After you’ve read the instruc­tions, you need to copy the con­tent from the text files and paste it into the “Cus­tomize Por­tal” sec­tion in the Freshdesk admin back­end. Each file has its cor­re­spond­ing area, which makes it eas­i­er to work with the files and their con­tent. Basi­cal­ly, you need to copy and paste the con­tent from the Stylesheet.txt into the text area in the Stylesheet tab, then do the same with the Header.txt, Footer.txt and PageLayout.txt, but in the Lay­out and Pages tab. To com­plete the process, copy the con­tent from the rest of the files, and place it in the cor­re­spond­ing areas in the Por­tal Pages tab.

Before pub­lish­ing your theme you need to save the changes, and then pre­view how the fron­tend of the por­tal looks. If every­thing seems right, press the ‘Pub­lish’ but­ton, and enjoy your new sup­port por­tal look.

How to use custom Freshthemes

Ready-made Freshthemes can be very use­ful to refresh your sup­port por­tal look, but they are often not suf­fi­cient to accu­rate­ly and suc­cess­ful­ly reflect your com­plete brand iden­ti­ty. If you want to total­ly cus­tomize your Freshdesk site, to match your cor­po­rate brand­ing, you have to use cus­tom themes.

You can use cus­tom Freshdesk themes to com­plete­ly cus­tomize the styles, lay­out and every detail of your Freshdesk por­tal. There are two ways to apply advanced customization:

• tweak­ing and cus­tomiz­ing the exist­ing theme
• build­ing a new Freshtheme from scratch

Regard­less of whether you choose to cus­tomize the exist­ing theme, or build a com­plete­ly new theme from scratch, you must be famil­iar with the pro­gram­ming lan­guages Javascript, Ruby, HTML and CSS, as well as some design tools, like Adobe Pho­to­shop or Illus­tra­tor. Every plat­form has its own chal­lenges on how to bend and shape it, to fit your needs and achieve a high-qual­i­ty end result, so pre­vi­ous expe­ri­ence in brand­ing sup­port por­tals would be very helpful.

Freshdesk themes and help from professionals

If you are over­whelmed with the cus­tomiza­tion require­ments, and would like to save time, our rec­om­men­da­tion is to hire a pro­fes­sion­al, who will fol­low all brand­ing guide­lines to achieve a superb appear­ance to your Freshdesk por­tal, while keep­ing all func­tion­al­i­ties intact, in the least amount of time.

Find out more about pur­ple­plan­et’s Freshdesk brand­ing options.