The total cost of picking the right WordPress theme is not driven by the dollar cost of purchasing a theme. It usually costs more to customize the theme to suit your needs than the cost of the theme itself.
Customization can include colors, layout or functional features, but it takes time to make these type of changes to a theme. PHP, cascading style sheets (CSS), HTML and sometimes Javascript coding is involved. The costs can be a lot more than what you intended if you don’t choose the correct baseline theme to work from.
Start with a Solid WordPress Framework
I suggest that you start by picking a full-featured framework to work with. Frameworks provide important capabilities like:
- Fast page load times – extremely important for usability (who wants to wait for a slow page to load?) and search engine optimization.
- Mobile responsive capabilities – this means that, instead of having to create a separate mobile website (which has a lot of inherent problems), your website layout conforms to the screen size and browser type that is viewing it. This is also extremely important to mobile search rankings. Mobile SEO is fast becoming the 800 pound gorilla in the corner.
- Layout Flexibility – capabilities like creating sidebars for specific pages or categories without having to write code is a killer feature. Sometimes you want a full-width page or a sidebar on the left instead of on the right without having to write a lot of code. Sometimes you want 2 sidebars. This comes up a lot with our customers.
- Error-free code – you want to start clean since you want the search engines to pick up your content.
My favorite theme framework is the Studiopress Genesis framework. It provides all of the capabilities above and many more. Another framework that comes up a lot is Woothemes, but we always seem to gravitate towards Studiopress.
Picking A WordPress Theme
Before starting to look for a theme keep in mind that the demo themes you see have home pages designed for that particular theme, but the home page can be changed to be anything you want. I suggest you start with the responsive themes at Studiopress. Pick a theme that meets all of this criteria to minimize the cost and effort of massive customizations:
- Main purpose – make sure the theme supports your main sites goals. An eCommerce site has different requirements than a site that is just a blog, a corporate lead generation site, a site that derives their income from advertising or a photography site. The advertising link above is the best all-around advertising plugin we have found for WordPress.
- Competitive analysis – Check out your competitors websites. You don’t want to miss important features that would render your website inferior before you come out of the gate.
- Get a logo – if you don’t have a logo then get one. Do a logo contest (just Google it) and make sure you put your best foot forward before launching your company online.
- Consider the golden triangle – make sure your most important content is in the golden triangle – the top-left of the screen before scrolling down. Websites visitor’s eyes follow the Golden Traingle in what is known as the F-Pattern. We typically use right-side sidebars to make sure your most important content is on the left-side.
- Theme coloring – at a minimum, pick a theme with the same fore/background color relationship as your logo – meaning, if the logo has dark foreground colors and a white or light background then make sure the theme you pick has the same. If you have a logo and the colors aren’t compatible with the theme then it will be costly to change the theme, assuming you don’t want to change your existing logo. See color references like this to make color compatibility decisions.
- Support – when picking a premium WordPress theme make sure the designer has a good tech support system. You’ll have questions as you build out the theme and this can make or break an important project.
Create Some Real Content for the Critical Areas of the Site
After selecting some candidate WordPress themes you’ll need to create content that is typical of what you want on the site. Images, text, videos, and sidebar content should all be added to multiple pages so you can test the layout before any customizations are done. Activate each theme to see how your content looks in it. Put your logo into them. Once you see a theme that looks to be the closest to your needs then you can start customizing it. You can as many paragraphs of sample latin text (Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet…) text from lipsum.com
Don’t Forget Hosting
Also important to your website’s success is a solid web hosting company. I recommend Bluehost for their amazing starting price at $3.99/month, excellent support and scalable hosting services. Scalable meaning, you start small and scale up as needed when your business grows. Bluehost can take you from shared hosting to VPS hosting all the way to dedicated hosting that can handle lots of traffic. I have used many hosting companies through the years, and Bluehost is the best general-purpose hosting company I have found to date. I use them for most of my clients for these reasons:
- Lightning fast servers
- Their websites are always up
- 24 hour tech support via chat, email and phone
- Scalability – if you need the power of cloud hosting it is supported at Bluehost
- Free transfer of existing cPanel sites if needed
If you need enterprise level traffic and big-iron hosting for hundreds of thousands or millions of visitors per month then you need to consider a hosting company like WP Engine. They do nothing but WordPress hosting. You can pool dedicated servers to handle amounts of traffic comparable to the busiest sites on the Internet.
Doing your homework before selecting a WordPress theme will save you time, effort and grief. Now you have all of the information you need to pick the right one. Good luck with it. If you want 21st to assist in your WordPress website design and development efforts then you can contact us with the information in the sidebar or complete the simple form on our contact us page.
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