Picking the Best WordPress Theme for your Site

With thousands of free themes out there on the WordPress Directory and hundreds of more premium themes out there from third parties, it can be very frustrating deciding what theme is best for your site. Ultimately it comes down to what you want to accomplish with your site and what kind of theme you want. Before we look into specifics, lets see what type of themes are out there.

The 3 Most Common Types of WordPress Themes

1. Free themes from WordPress.org – These can prove to be good if you are looking for a simple site. There are a few things to watch out for when going for this option though. First you want to make sure the theme is coded well. If you are not a web developer yourself, this can be very challenging to do yourself. You cant overlook this either; if your site is not coded well, it will not look good to many of the search engines out there. However if your just looking to get your site going on something cheep and are considering upgrading later, The WordPress Theme Directory could be a good option for you. You may also want to go with one of the more popular themes due to the fact that they are usually the best and most updated themes.
2. Premium Themes (with little customization) – Many people go to sites like Elegant Themes to find a theme that works for them. Usually these sites are coded well, but they usually only have a few color schemes. Elegant themes is actually one of the few that provides the user with several different backgrounds and color schemes for every one of their themes to allow most sites made with the them to be unique. I personally suggest using Elegant Themes for this reason. There are others out there that are good as well such as themeforest.net, woothemes.com, and studiopress.com.
3. Premium Themes (with lots of customization) – If you want you website to be totally unique with a design others cant copy, I would go with this option. I use the Thesis Theme to do this myself. They have a completely separate options page for the theme to make it easy to make changes. They also have a forum with very quick responses. The only downside to this option is that you have to do a lot of the work yourself and it can cost a little bit more. If you are looking for a totally customized design without hiring a web designer, this would be the way to go. Headwaythemes.com might be another one you want to try, but I never thought it had as much power as Thesis.

Other Things to Look For in your WordPress Theme

• Make sure you theme follows your niche – This is basic, but still needs to be said. For instance, if you have a blog about food; you should have a theme that has the color scheme of food (such as green, orange, yellow, and so on).
• Make sure the theme coding is good – If you know anything about coding, it would be a good idea to look at the coding of the theme to make sure it will look good on the search engines. So if the code looks all jumbled and messy, it probably would not look good to the search engines.
• Make a design you can be proud of – Remember that this will be showcased to the world. Even if a picture does not show up right or things do not align properly, this would be a good reason to try a new theme. In the end, simple mistakes like that can though away tons of potential clients or customers.
• Make sure the themes has a couple customization options – While this is not essential, it would definitely be a good idea to make sure there is an options page with the theme you choose. It can make the customization process of the theme much easier.
• Make sure the comments look good – This is often overlooked, but it would be a good idea to see how comments look for the theme. This may not be important at the beginning, but can prove to be vital when trying to increase comment activity on your blog.

Do The Research!

Ultimately, you should look around for a while before you pick your final theme. It can be quiet annoying switching themes part way though due to problems in the theme coding or theme framework. That is why I personally go with the premium themes, so that I am able to contact someone right away if I have any problems. If you have any questions or comments, please leave one below.