Choose Your Theme

With WordPress, you’re spoiled for choice with a lot of amazing and beautiful themes – free and premium. Having a lot of choices isn’t always a good thing, especially when it’s time for you to choose a theme for your website. It’s easy to feel overwhelmed so we sometimes resort to inaction or end up choosing a low-quality theme.

Choosing the right theme could determine the future of your website. Not only does a good theme make a good first impression to your visitors, it also helps your SEO. It’s true! Your website’s structure plays a vital role in SEO. That said, it’s important to know exactly what you need in a WordPress theme.

First off, let’s find out where you can find WordPress themes.

• org has a huge repository of free themes. There are some really good ones here, but if you ask me, I have not yet found something that I like. For that reason, I recommend you look somewhere else.

• com is where you can find some of the best premium themes for WordPress. Here, you can find flexible, highly customizable, and high-quality themes at very affordable prices. What’s more, most of the theme authors provide excellent customer support. When I don’t have time (or when I’m not in the mood) to create my own theme for a website, I go to this site to buy themes that I can tweak a little to suit my needs.

• You can also find high-quality, affordable WordPress themes at ElegantThemes and WooThemes. ElegantThemes, for example, provides plans where you can pay $69 – $89 every year so you can have complete access to all of their themes and plugins.

• If you really want a theme that perfectly matches your niche, industry or business, you can opt to design your own WordPress theme. In my case, I design my own theme and have my team code them. Doing so allows me to create themes that matches my authority site planning.

Since ThemeForest.net is my favorite go-to source for high-quality WordPress themes, let me show you how I find great themes there.

Besides WordPress, ThemeForest also caters to other CMS, so make sure to click on the WordPress tab to narrow down your choices.

The themes are categorized based on the type of website you want to set up (Blog/Magazine, Corporate, Creative, Mobile, Entertainment, Education, Nonprofit, eCommerce, etc.)

You can get a quick preview of the theme if you hover your mouse over the image next to the theme’s name.

Most of the good-looking WordPress themes are magazine-style themes, which you can find under Blog/Magazine.

Simply click on the theme that you like.

You can have a live preview of your chosen theme by clicking on the Live Preview button. You’d get to see exactly how the theme will look like if you use it for your site.

Points to Ponder:

There are a lot of themes in the market that come with a lot of complex features. It might look good in display, but it might not work out well in terms of functionality. If you want a theme that has a lot going on, you can have a custom one. This is the only way to assure functionality.

Also, don’t get to fancy as you might overwhelm your site visitors. Don’t add any unnecessary elements to your design. Go for simple designs because they’re easier to modify.

You also need to check for browser compatibility before using a theme. Not all themes are compatible with all browsers. Make sure a theme is cross-browser compatible so you won’t be leaving anyone behind. Some theme authors might suggest you shouldn’t worry about older browsers like IE 6, and most tech designers these days tend to ignore Internet Explorer compatibility. Don’t go for a theme (or a theme author for that matter) who didn’t put enough time and effort in providing quality work for you. Keep in mind that there’s still a lot of people out there who use Internet Explorer and other lesser known browsers, so make sure you look for a cross-browser compatible WordPress theme.

If you have any questions or concerns, feel free to drop them on the Questions box below.