I've taken a quick look at your site and am happy to talk to you. Take a look at my reviews here on Clarity. Product advice is an area I provide a lot of help to Clarity members about.
If you consider yourself one of the best (which I assume you do, given that you're looking for high-paying clients), you should look into TopTal https://www.toptal.com/talent/apply TopTal is a freelance site similar to UpWork, Freelancer, Odesk, etc...the difference is, TopTal ONLY hires the top...
There are advantages to both approaches. Using a theme such as Avada or X (my recommendation) will make the process faster and guarantee consistency, however the downsides are bloated code and potentially slow page load times. If you don't have a large or media-heavy site, this may not be an issu...
Yeah they should...user meta and groups also an option
Strictly speaking, no. No one customizes anything. They say they want that, but this is a flaw in listening to users. If you watch their behavior, no one (I mean, 1/10th of 1%, at best) customizes. Now, that isn't to say mapping is good, readable, or often applicable to contexts. Aside from incr...
This is quite simple with screenshots and Photoshop. If you are bootstrapping, try resources like fivrr.com, elance.com, or odesk.com Otherwise, ask your friends/family/neighbors if they have a copy of Photoshop for you to do this. If you'd like, setup a call and I can have my in-house designer...