3 Tips on Choosing a WordPress Theme
Posted on December 5, 2011 by Charles
Need help with making your first website? Building a website can be time consuming and if you are someone that lacks basic design and programming skills, creating a site from scratch may be impossible. Fortunately, there are many platforms that can help you to build your own site without any programming or design knowledge. One of those platforms is WordPress.
WordPress is a popular open source blogging platform that has been used by millions of people to create their own blogs and websites. Although it may take some time initially to get familiar with, it is fully customizable and you can edit everything using their pre-configured widgets and plugins. Perhaps the best thing about WordPress is the ability to choose from a number of free and paid themes which allow you to transform the look and feel of your site with just one click. Although changing your theme is extremely easy, choosing a decent theme can take a lot of thought – here are 3 tips that will help you make your mind up:
Tips on Choosing The Perfect Theme
1. Functionality and User Friendliness – The theme that you 
choose must be user friendly and easy to navigate. Put yourself in your readers shoes and ask yourself if the theme you are thinking of choosing makes reading and finding content comfortable and enjoyable. Is there a search box? Is the text too small or too big? Are there too many images? Are there too many menus?- You should always ask these questions and also be thinking of ways in which you can edit the problems to make them more user friendly.
2. Match The Theme to Content – The theme and colors used in your WordPress design should always match your content, purpose and niches. For example, if you site is about gardening, you will probably want to choose a theme with bright colors and colors associated with gardening such as green, yellow and brown. A gardening site will also probably have a lot of images of your own plants and flowers so the theme should also be able display images prominently.
3. Monetization – Most people will, at some point, want to make money from their personal blogs and websites. Bear this in mind when choosing a theme as some of them are not optimized for placing ads in eye-catching areas. If possible, look for a theme that has pre-built areas for ads as they can help you to save a lot of time when it comes to adding ads such as Adsense and banners. You will also benefit from the experience of the designer who will most probably have more experience with correct ad placements.
Although there are thousands of free themes on the internet, premium themes usually look better and have more features. There are many providers of premium themes and one my favorites is Studiopress. To find out more about them, please take a look at my Studiopress wordpress theme review which explains all the features along with my experiences with using them.