Don’t become a Fashion Victim – A no-nonsense guide to shopping for themes

A theme is basically a set of templates that your content will sit inside, and be visible to users on the ‘front end’ – when they visit your website.

One of the best features of WordPress is the myriad of themes available to use, and the infinite ways they can be customised to suit your style.

However the huge array of choices can leave you bewildered – especially because choosing a theme is probably one of the first things you’ll want to do with your website.

This post will take you step by step through some of the questions to ask to arrive at finding the perfect theme for your site.

Knowing your Audience

Who will be looking at your website?

First and foremost keep in mind who are your target audience? What kind of image do you want to present to them?

Do you want to come across as high-tech, corporate, hipster, punk, or more approachable and natural, well informed or playful? etc.

What content will you put on your website?

Keep in mind what kind of content you will be publishing. A lot of themes feature full size photos, galleries, sliding images and effects – but these won’t make you look any better if you don’t have excellent photos. If you’re publishing long articles think about how easy the text is to read – does the layout focus readers attention on the text?

If you will be using extended functions and plugins for example to translate your website, organise posts on a map or sell things online, have a look at what kind of plugins you will use and search for themes that are known to work well together.

How will your readers find what they are looking for?

Will you have loads of information that people will need to sort through to find what they want? – Start by planning out the ways users will navigate around your content.

Do you want your readers to focus on the latest information in your website? (try searching for ‘wordpress blog theme’).

Do you want most of your information presented on the front page? (try adding ‘one-page’ to your search queries)

Is it really important to rank highly in Google searches? Some themes are slightly better than others for this. (check if the theme is ‘SEO friendly’)

Searching for your theme

Are you hosting your website on wordpress.com?

If you’re using WordPress.com (see explanation here) there are only 326+ options to choose from! You can find them all here.

Many of these themes have basic options to change colours schemes, but otherwise the ability to customise your sites styles is very limited, unless you pay for a premium plan access the style.css file – the price is still reasonable but you still may find it limits what you can do.

Is your WordPress site hosted somewhere else?

If so, changing your themes fonts, colours, making things disappear and tweaking things here and there is not too big a job for a designer – and not beyond learning how to do yourself.

What will take a lot more effort to change is how all the elements – headers, menus, posts, sidebars are laid out on the pages. If you can find a layout that will work exactly how you want it to, you’ll save yourself a lot of time and effort.

WordPress.org has a directory of free themes here – but there are tens of thousands more out there on developers websites and marketplaces.

If you start googling you’ll notice a lot of entries like ’10 Best WordPress Themes of 2016′. Check out a few of these posts – they’ve already done some of the work of sorting through tens of thousands of themes for you.

Keep focused on the layout – not the content!

Now that you’ve started searching, make sure to keep your focus on the key things you’ve identified above.

Check out the ‘theme demo’ sites and see how they roughly work – but don’t focus on the pretty pictures or the text – its not important. Most theme demos use a made up language called ‘lorem ipsum’ for exactly this reason.

A lot of people will search for themes or other websites that are in their field of interest – that often helps but again the content is not important. If your making a business site, searching for ‘business themes’ would be useful, because in this case business is an adjective and will hopefully come up with themes that look like they mean business. Other searches such as ‘environment themes’ might be slightly useful – but environment is not an adjective – and just because a theme has a few shades of green doesn’t make it the right one for you.

Make a list

Choose a few themes or sites that you really like, and keep a note of them. Now we’ll test them to see if they are more than just a pretty face…

Testing your choices

Is it responsive?

Responsive means that it will scale (and re-arrange) itself to fit on on different size screens.

To test whether a theme is responsive, look up the site in your browser, and drag the side of the browser window to make it skinnier. This will give you a pretty good idea how the theme will look on mobile phones and tablets.

If its not responsive – you need to scroll left and right in your browser to see the whole page, or elements of the layout are popping out in crazy places, then forget it.

For some projects how the theme works on a mobile phone may be more important than on a computer. Going back to thinking about how your audience will find wht they’re looking for – if you want a bus timetable you don’t want to have to pull out your desktop. However for all projects – even say a blog about desktop computing – its essential that the theme is legible on a mobile.

Is it accessible?

Again remembering your audience, it may be an important consideration for your website to be legible by screen-readers by people who are visually impaired. Most themes should be legible – but some are better than others, and some might come up in a jumble. If its well ‘marked-up’ to be read by a screen-reading computer then chances are it will also be easy for other robots like Google Search to understand.

Is the theme well supported?

If you’re browsing themes through your WordPress Dashboard > Appearance > Themes > Add New, or on the wordpress.org Theme Directory, then you can easily see a star-rating for each theme – pay attention to this, but more importantly how many ratings its got – if its got a lot then lots of people are using it, and if something breaks then its more likely people there to help. Click through to the theme’s support forum, and see if issues posted there are getting resolved. If your theme has a lot of complex elements or your planning to do a lot of customising of your theme this could be really important.

Is it free?

This is one of the first things people put in their search queries when looking for a theme. But its last on my list. Premium themes cost something between $30 and $200, but if you’ve found the perfect theme that doesn’t need a lot of changes, then it will save you more than enough time and effort to make it worth your while.

Maybe premium themes will provide better support or have less issues – but not necessarily – check it out first. Do be aware of premium themes that charge a yearly subscription fee for updates, if you can’t afford or won’t remember to pay it. However there is also an advantage in a yearly subscription – the company is more likely to keep updating and providing support for your theme for years to come.

If it is a free theme the big advantage is you can easily install it through your WordPress, test it out with a sample of your content, and move on to another if it doesn’t work for you.

You made it now what?

So you’ve chosen a theme, or at least a few options.

Take some time to get to know how it works. Some themes also add a lot of options to your dashboard – and sometimes it takes a bit to understand how they work.

Before you customise it too much, add some more content, a few posts and pages – even if you change your theme later these will still remain saved in your database. If you add menu items these will usually disappear when your switching themes – but you can easily put them back by going to Appearance > Menus > Manage Locations

Once you’ve committed to your theme, began adding elements like widgets and possibly started using a customised home page, adding fields or taxonomies, installed a ‘child-theme’ and started customising the styles, then it will be a waste of time to change themes, so its time well spent to have gone through these steps and chosen the right theme for you.