America In Transition: PB119: How to Choose the Right WordPress Theme for Your Blog

Monday, May 30, 2016

PB119: How to Choose the Right WordPress Theme for Your Blog

How to Decide on a WordPress Theme for Your Blog

Today I have a treat for you. Today we have a special guest, one of our new subject matter experts, Kelly Exeter from Swish Design. Kelly is one of those people who produces a heap of great content and also runs a business on the side. Kelly is one of the go to people in Australia when it comes to blog design.

I received a question from Nils from Soul Thoughts who asks a question that many bloggers who are starting a blog. What is the best WordPress theme to choose for my blog (and how to make that decision). I’m not a designer, so I’m going to let our design expert Kelly share her tips on choosing the right WordPress Theme.

You can either listen to the episode via the podcast player above or check it out on iTunes or Stitcher. Alternatively if you prefer to read – Kelly has written up the full show below for you to keep coming back to including all the links and resources mentiond in the episode.

PB119: How to Choose the Right WordPress Theme for Your Blog

Hello! I’m here today to try and answer this very big question: What are the best themes to use if you have a WordPress blog?

And the very short answer to this is – there is no best theme. There are many themes out there that will work well for your needs. The hard part is narrowing down the list.

If you type ‘WordPress themes’ into Google you will usually end up some place like ThemeForest where, at current count, there are over 6000 themes to choose from. Even somewhere with a slightly smaller selection like Elegant Themes has 87 on offer and Studiopress, the home of Genesis themes has over 50.

So – how on earth do you choose the best theme for your needs from this wealth of choice?

Well, my number one suggestion is to stop looking in those theme libraries and start instead with the blogs out there whose designs you love.

Most WordPress themes these days are built on off-the-shelf templates which means that blog you love, you can access the same theme they’ve used.

A quick word about this however – that blog you love – is it their header you particularly love? Or their typography? Or their imagery?

If so, those are design elements that can be incorporated into any theme out there.

When you’re deciding on a theme, you really need to choose one based on it having a layout you like – so you like how their logo and menu are placed, how their blog archives are laid out, how their blogs posts are laid out, and most importantly, what elements they have on their home page and where those elements are positioned.

For example, if you choose the Metro Pro theme from Genesis – make sure you are choosing it because you like how it’s laid out … not because it has nice images.

So – let’s say you love the new Being Boss blog design at beingboss.club and you’re thinking that could work well for you. The first thing you want to do is find out what theme they’re using. You do this by viewing the source code of the website.

To do this, type into your browser window: view-source:http://beingboss.club/

(NB: You can do this for any site by typing in view-source:FULLWEBSITEURL)

Once you’re viewing the source code do a search for this: wp-content/themes.

This will come up in a few places in the source code and the word that directly follows the word ‘themes’ in the source is the name of the theme.

So for Being Boss, I can see their theme is called Art Mag.

If you then Google ‘Art Mag WordPress theme’ you’ll see it’s a theme you can buy from Themeforest for $49.

A word of caution – when you’re checking out your favourite website and you’re loving how they look and you’re thinking I’m saying just buy the same theme and your site can look like that too, there is a giant caveat here. If you’re loving how a site looks, it’s probably because they have killer imagery. If you don’t have the same killer imagery, then use the same theme as them all your like, your site won’t look like theirs.

This, incidentally, is both a good and bad thing.

The bad comes from the disappointment you feel because your site doesn’t look as good as theirs.

The good comes from the fact that you can use exactly the same theme as someone else but your two sites will look quite different because you’re using different imagery, logo, fonts and colours. Just make sure your site uses great imagery and fontography and you’ll be fine.

Another thing that’s important to remember is that when you install that theme on your website, it needs to be set up to look like the demo version or the website you loved – it won’t look like that straight out of the box. If you’re able to follow instructions, then, using the theme documentation, you should be able to get the layout looking the way it way sold to you in the demo.

If you’re struggling, get in touch with the guys at ThemeValet.com. For $99 or thereabouts, they will set the theme up to look like the demo for you.

Another caveat – if your site has no pages and no posts (ie no content), it will be very difficult to get it looking like anything. So I always recommend creating at least an About and a Contact page and loading in 2-3 blog posts before loading in a theme and trying to make things look pretty.

Now – what if there aren’t any sites out there that have caught your eye? Well, some fairly common themes doing the rounds currently are:

Simple Mag which can be found on ThemeForest.com – this is particularly great if you’re looking for a magazine style layout.
If you’re looking for a more bloggy type layout then Foodie, Metro and Lifestyle Pro are all great looking, easy to use Genesis themes and can be found on StudioPress.com.

Note: with the Genesis themes you first have to install the based Genesis framework (which comes as a theme), then you install and activate whichever of the look and feel themes you’ve chosen.

Another really important thing you need to keep in mind when choosing themes these days is that they are responsive on mobile. Happily, most themes in most marketplaces these days are. All the themes I mention today certainly are.

Now, what about themes like Divi, Bridge and the X theme?

These are themes that allow you to set up your site pages pretty much any way you like via inbuilt Page Builders that allow you to drag and drop elements.

This sounds like a dream but in reality, I have found these Page Builders to be really slow and painful to use. You make a small tweak to say the padding around an image, or the size of a heading, for example, and then you have to save the draft of the page, and then preview it … it’s really slow going and frustrating.

Also – as much as these types of site sell themselves on being easy for non-tech savvy people to use, they’re just not.

Now, if you are quite tech savvy, these themes are amazing because they offer a huge amount of flexibility and design freedom. If you are not tech savvy, just do no go there – they will make you cry.

Of all the ‘Page Builder included’ themes out there (and I have seen many) – the one that has impressed me the most is the X theme. At Swish Design (my business) we have the ability to design and build custom themes and this is what I intended to do with my own website re-design at kellyexeter.com.au recently. I did the page design, and then because I needed the new design faster than my guys would be able to code it, I actually rebuilt the site using the X theme (+ Beaver Builder instead of the X Theme’s inbuilt Cornerstone builder) as a temporary measure. And guess what, it did the job so well I haven’t bothered to get my guys to code a custom theme for me after all.

No other theme like that – not Divi, not Bridge, not any of the several ones I’ve tried – have been as easy to use as X + Beaver Builder.

So there you go.

As I mentioned at the start, pointing you in the right direction as to a ‘best theme’ for your needs is a very ‘how long is a piece of string’ question because there are so many variables to consider.

My major tip in this regard is that, if ever you’re in doubt, choose the simpler solution.

And remember, people are coming to your blog to read, and they’re mostly doing so on mobile. So as long as your theme is responsive, loads fast, and makes it easy to read your posts on mobile devices, you’ll already be ahead of the pack.

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Kelly Exeter has been a web and graphic designer for 15 years and has worked with WordPress for over 8 years. You can find her at Swish Design by day, and tinkering with her personal blog design at night.

How did you go with today’s episode?

I hope this has been helpful today. If you have more questions, I would be more than happy to tackle them myself or enlist one of our subject matter experts.

Disclaimer: ProBlogger is an affiliate for some themes and services mentioned in this article. We make a commission if you purchase these products which is how we keep the vast majority of what we do on ProBlogger free (and how Darren keeps his expensive coffee habit going). Affiliate products are carefully chosen and are always genuine recommendations of products that we either pay for and use ourselves or that come with strong recommendations from our trusted expert friends.

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