Choose a Wordpress Theme

Choosing a Wordpress Theme can be difficult. You have to look at your individual needs and make sure you experiment early on before delving too deep into your blog.

OK, I realize there are other ways to blog other than Wordpress, but based on my experience and from reading countless posts from those who have used other blogging software I believe that Wordpress offers the easiest and most flexible option for those of us who are not competent at programming. Wordpress has a great community and a massive amount of free plugins and themes available and you can get a site up and running minutes. Wordpress is also very SEO friendly (i.e. google seems to like Wordpress and you can get your site listed on google fairly quickly – or at least that’s been my experience).

Free Wordpress Themes vs Premium Themes

Now you have decided to use Wordpress the big decision is what Wordpress theme do you use? Over the last few years I have purchased a few premium themes with mixed results and used a whole lot of free themes. The biggest issue I found with free themes was that the support was very scant and the functionality wasn’t quite there. Also, support for certain plugins can often be an issue.  There are a host of free wordpress themes which are good enough for the average joe if you are happy with a fairly generic looking site and don’t mind not having much flexibility with your layout.

With Premium themes (i.e. themes you have to pay for) you have to watch out for those who are trying to make a quick buck. If you are new to the whole blogging thing it can be a bit hard to tell, but if you go to forums and search for comments about various themes you can usually find enough information to make an informed decision.

I have experimented with a lot of Premium Themes. The companies that make the best combination of themes and good support that I have found are Templatic, Woo Themes and DIY Themes (Thesis). Solostream also isn’t bad, but I think Woo Themes and Templatic are better value for money.

Both Woo Themes and Templatic have a wide range of sites to suit different themed sites, so if you are making quite a few sites these two are good options. The advantage of using these are that you get a really nice looking site up and running in a matter of minutes. The Thesis theme actually has more flexibility in terms of what you can do with the site – e.g. changing column widths, colour scheme, number of columns etc., but the out of the box layout is a bit plain and needs a bit of work to make it look good. Most of the premium sites are also SEO optimized.

At the time of writing this I am using the AIM Wordpress theme from Templatic.