Some Tips on Choosing A WordPress Theme.

Helen was on a Theme hunt a few days ago which reminded me of my regular theme hunting adventures. Hunting for a good theme can be an exhilarating adventure but can be a very frustrating one too when you are fussy like me. One of these days, I am going to get an expert to design one for just the way I want it. In the meantime, all I can do is to get a theme I like, and tweak it to my satisfaction.

There are ways which you can do the tweaking offline away from prying eyes that might catch you with your themes all messed up when they happen to drop by your blog while you were wrecking your brain on how to change the layout. I will talk about that on another occasion. For today, I will like to share my experience on choosing a good theme and what to look for when choosing one.

Looks and Feel

Looks are subjective, so I won’t be dwelling into that. Go for one that impresses you and serves what you have in your blog. If you have lots of stuffs on your sidebar, go for a 3 column theme. If not a 2 column them looks neater and less cluttered.

Colors are also subjective, but research has been done by those who have nothing better to do and it was found that a blog with a white background tends to keep the readers looking longer at your blog. That’s why you see all those successful bloggers having a “white” theme. A dark background is repulsive, or so it seems, but dark backgrounds are preferred by many bloggers because it shows character, it has some sort of a mysterious feel to it. Personally I like a white background for my content area where my articles are because it looks clean and it makes embedding images more elegant. It is a lot easier on the eyes, well, to my eyes, at least.

So much for looks. Choose one that fancies you, for you will never be able to satisfy everybody. Looks aside, there is one thing that a theme should have but left out by many blog designers. Check and see if the theme you chose includes this important aspect .

The 404 page.

A lot of theme designers don’t include the 404 page file in their themes. It is something that I don’t quite understand why as including a 404 page file doesn’t take much effort. It is a stand alone file. You can read the importance of the 404 page in this article, Why You Need Custom 404 Pages, by Simon Heseltine of Search Engine Guide.com

The theme you are looking at now also did not come with a 404 page and I had to make one myself. Checkout my personalised Error 404 Page Not Found. It will keep visitors in your blog even if they can’t find the posts they were looking for.

Making a 404 Error Page is simple but not as simple as writing a page and titling 404. It has to be an individual php file, uploaded to the theme you are using so it becomes part of the theme. Maybe I will find the time to write a post on how later on.