Are you in the process of starting a new blog or redesigning your current website but comparing themes to get the best WordPress theme or Blogger blog template? Or you found an array of great looking WordPress themes but now you’re confused about which one to settle for?
Use the top 7 considerations (in this post) for choosing your own best-fit WordPress theme. This post is a follow up post to “Over 10 Legally Free Premium WordPress Theme Sources – Direct From Theme Developers”. By the way, that post featured sources of some of the best premium and professional looking free WordPress themes I found around the web.
What to Consider When Buying Or Choosing A Top WordPress Theme or Blogger Template
Whether you are buying a (paid) WordPress theme or looking for free themes, you sure have to look through a pack of themes to picking the best WordPress theme design for whatever purpose you want.
This can take a considerable amount of time, and as you know, time is money. The purpose of this post is to provide you with the top six things to use to eliminate all but that one, right-fit WordPress theme. Note that the 7 steps for finding the right blog theme applies to all kinds of themes, whether blogger template, drupal, WordPress, Joomla etc.
How to Choose The Best WordPress Theme or Blogger Template in 7 Steps
Below are 7 factors to consider before choosing any WordPress theme; these also apply irrespective of any blog platform, including choosing Blogger blog templates.
1. Easy to Customize
Find a WordPress theme that looks close to what you have in mind, requiring little or no customization. Else, be ready to pay someone to tweak it to look as good as you want or waste time struggling to customize the theme yourself. Would you rather not get off the ground fast, posting contents?
This is my story. I also wasted lots of days trying to configure one of the free cool themes I had found (and didn’t want to let go until I got it to look how I wanted); and that involved learning a lot of how to go the the backend of those WordPress files and add a code here and there. Those techy work suck, for me. Except if you are tech-savvy, you don’t need to do that – just plugin any theme and if it does not have the elements you want in the places, demo test another.
2. Appearance in Multiple Browsers
Some WordPress themes look awful in some browsers. Even when you find a theme looking good in your own browser, you need to check it out in other browsers to be sure it is compatible across board.
3. Side-Bar Banner Advertisement Placeholders
This is one of the features that I wanted but found a lot of cool WordPress themes did not have. Note that this option is only important if you want to advertise a thing or two on your blog, using banner ads.
4. Plug and Play Sidebar Widgets?
Again here is one of the major time wasters I experienced – trying to mess with codes to add additional widgets (to that theme I first found and liked). You do not need to spend time learning to hack any theme. The only reason you’ll want to mess around with the code configuring sidebar widgets is either that you are technically-Wordpress savvy or you know who to pay (and can pay) to get someone to fix the widgets for you. If you’re not theme-technically savvy or cannot afford to pay for a designer to tweak a theme, I suggest you choose a WordPress theme that has plug-and-play sidebars and widgets, usually with drag and drop using a mouse.
5. Appearance on Demo
Always ensure not to rely on what any WordPress theme looks like in the sample image, check it out in by doing a demo. Most WordPress theme developers provide demo links to enable you check out their themes before downloading or installing.
By the way, you can use the free “Theme Tester Plugin” (for WordPress) to check out how any theme will look on your blog, without installing the theme on a live site. This is a cool tip if you’re considering redesigning your current website or blog.
6. Support
This is where paid WordPress themes beat free themes. Free WordPress themes do not come with support from developers.That means free theme users do not receive updates and upgrades. However, some of them, like Thrilling Theme (that I use on this blog) do come with some documentation from the developers, to guide you in installing and customizing the theme. Again, some of them that are open source have users’ supported forums, with minimal support from the developer.
7. Price
Note that the most expensive WordPress theme may not be the best suitable for your purpose. So, it’s not about price. Look beyond the price and use the above 6 factors to narrow down to selecting the best WordPress theme that is right for your website or blog. Ensure to follow the above steps when deciding a website theme to use – whether free or paid.
a. Good Top Premium Blog Themes to choose from
Elegant Themes: Great offering of over 70 premium website themes on a low price – best if you’re on a tight budget and want great looking themes. If you’re an affiliate marketer who will build more sites, this is recommended because you’ll buy tons of themes for less than the price of one. Many top bloggers are still using Elegant themes.
WooThemes: Clean designs, beautiful themes for any industry and great price too PLUS you get 2 extra premium themes when you buy 1 theme.
b. Great Free Blog Themes to choose from: By the way, have you seen my compilation of the best legally free premium WordPress themes, direct from theme developers? Go check them out and you’ll be convinced that the best WordPress themes can sometimes be obtained free, legally too (wink-wink: I got this blog’s theme legally free; you’ll see how to get it, in that post). After-all, they say that the best things in life are free (sometimes, but finding them takes time:)
Next Steps…
I suggest you save or bookmark this post to refer to, whenever you need to select or choose a WordPress theme or Blogger blog template. It’ll come in handy.
Once again, I’ve enjoyed writing this post just for you, and I hope you did find value in it. So, as usual before you leave, I’ll ask you to do me 2 favours:
Share this post: Please help me share this post to help a friend find legal sources of premium WordPress themes. Stumble this post, Tweet it Facebook it, Digg it, Email it… Look down below or to your left and you’ll find the one click, easy share buttons.
Comment: Now, this is how I’ll know that you really were here:) The comment box is right down below – go now and leave your footprint (comment) behind…
Again, thanks for your time, reading.
Cheers and I’ll see you in the comment side:)
Stella
P.S: No blog yet? By the way, if you’re reading this post and thinking of how (steps) to setup your own WordPress blog using any of those free premium WordPress themes, don’t worry I’ve got you covered. Here’s my post on: “Step by Step Process to Create A New WordPress Blog From Scratch”
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20 replies on “Top 7 Factors to Consider Before Deciding On The Right-Fit WordPress Theme For Your Website or Blog”
Hey Thanks for sharing this simple tips with us. I am going to start my new techblog and thinking to use this theme :
http :// www. theme-junkie. com/themes/resizable/
Whats your suggetions Stella?
Thanks for the posting … helpful in avoiding newbie mistakes in choosing a WP theme.
Absolutely, Scott. That’s the purpose of this post and I’m always happy when a reader informs me they followed the steps to find new WordPress themes for their websites.
Choosing theme is the very hectic job. nice work thanks to share.
Thanks for reading Sai.
Great article -thanks! What theme do you use for your site?
Thanks, Susan.
This blog’s theme is ‘Thrilling Theme’, a customized out of Woothemes FreshNews.
[…] in the same place as on my previous WhiteHouse theme, this makes my web page easy to navigate. Here are a few ideas on choosing the right theme for your web […]
Stella, I like your post, I really like your tip on “Theme Tester Plugin”, I’m gonna have to test the tester 🙂
I have written an article called 9 must dos before choosing a wordpress, which is similar to yours. Take a look and let me know your thoughts. http://www.sitebuilder.ws/9-must-dos-before-choosing-a-wordpress-theme.html
cheers…
Hi Scott:
Good to see you. Isn’t it amazing that we happened to be thinking alike? I liked the way your own post complemented mine, covering the factors that I did not even include.
I’m glad you liked the idea of suggesting using the “Theme Tester Plugin” to pre-test any theme on one’s site, without affecting the front-end (readers view).
Templates plays a significant role in attracting unique visitors but while choosing a template for blog/website you also need to check that is template to heavy or not? if template takes too much time to load then it can really hurt you site, try to keep code ratio low than content ratio, in other words try to maintain c2c ratio around 20-25 or more, below that number site is not considered as optimized …
I agree – template design, look and feel play a big part on traffic generation. You’re so right on the coding part – yes, that tends to affect the load time, and seems to be a major reason why some bloggers ditch a pretty website template for a not-so-pretty one.
Thanks for your rich contribution here, Gary. You sound very knowledgeable about website design. Enjoy your weekend, and hope to see you around some more.
I have not been convinced to use the paid themes, yet. I keep searching to see what they offer that I don’t already have. Until then, I’ll stick with the freebies.
Hahaha – Roy, I’m RFLMAO (for real).
I agree with you, if one looks carefully, you can find a couple of pretty good free blog themes that meet most of the factors to consider in choosing a theme. There’s a general misconception that free is not quality but I beg to differ. Yes, it’s not always true – afterall some theme developers offer their premium paid themes for free, after a few months/ years AND some A-List bloggers pay heavily to get customized premium themes built for them and then give them away to the public (after a while).
Those are the kind of themes I featured in my post on “Free Premium WordPress Themes”. Every theme can be tweaked to look slightly unique to you – either you pay a techie person or do it yourself if you can.
It’s just that some of the paid themes have some SEO features already integrated and also are easy to use for a non-techie person. Again, if you look well, you’ll find very good free themes that are also easy to use, SEO’d already or you’ll add SEO plugins.
Like you, I’m also sticking with the freebie (but premium) themes.
I like to congratulate you for doing a nice job Stella.
Hi BlogNewz, thanks a big bunch. I appreciate your kind words and look forward to seeing you around again:)
Enjoy your day!
Hi Stella, This is cool 🙂
I always find myself in this mess, choosing the right theme and customizing it well. But I think I need something simple…
Your post is informative…
Hi Stella, these are important considerations for sure. I’m using Thesis theme and the Thesis Awesome blogskin. These two combined make most of these decisions easy for me. The theme is quite flexible and the blog skin makes the customizations a breeze for me and my limited coding skills 🙂 Thanks for the post Stella.
Hi Ileane, it’s a pleasure seeing you here at my blog:) Thanks for taking the time to come read and comment.
I hear lots of good things about Thesis theme such as you mentioned, especially the ease of use. My blog theme is a customized WooThemes ‘FreshNews Theme’ that I dicovered after a month of searching for a legally free WordPress theme. Before this theme, I spent time trying to tweak a pretty theme for weeks, googling what to do first.
I hope this post would be helpful for beginner bloggers not to make the mistake I made.
[…] may run into a problem of choice. I did too. However, I will write you a follow-up to this post on: 7 Factors to consider before choosing a best-fit WordPress theme. That post should get you to narrow down to one single theme in that […]