These are my personal preferences and it might no reflect the views of others. When I see a nice WordPress Theme, I will consider these few factors before trying them out.
1. The Layout
It has to be appealing to me. That’s common sense I think. LOL. If you feel it is ugly, I don’t think you will consider it too, but then, looks is a very subjective thing and what looks good to me might look lousy to others so I please myself first.
My preference is, it should be quite clean and uncluttered, easily navigable and not too colorful to the extent that it hurts my eyes. Two or three columns is fine with me as long as I have enough space to put in everything I have.
2. Search Engine Optimized.
When I feel that the looks are okay, I would also like the theme to be optimized for Search Engines. There are many people like me who do not have the knowledge of optimizing our themes other than maybe using some plugins. If the theme’s codes have been done optimized, it would be an added bonus.
3. Features In the Theme.
The most frustrating feature missing in many themes that have “qualified” the top two criteria is the “edit post” function. I said many times before that I find it rather surprising that many top class theme developers finds it unnecessary to include that tiny line of codes. One single line of code and they will save the user of their theme endless frustrations when they want to edit their posts.
Even the most prolific writers sometimes makes mistakes that escapes their eyes even after proof reading their posts 3 times before publishing. Without that “edit” link in my published post, I have to go back to the dashboard, go to manage post, find that particular one, then click “edit” before I can make any changes. After editing, I return to the manage post page and have to click “view” to see if the change has been made. Having that “edit” link in my published post takes all these stupid steps away. Of course I can add in the code myself, but why omit such a useful feature in the first place?
Another feature that many designers and coders don’t like to include in their style sheet is the image align function. Again I find it utterly strange. Maybe it’s because WordPress has that feature in their Post Editor, but it sucks big time. Try using it and 10 out 10 times the image don’t appear correctly or at least neatly.
Additional cool features like what this theme has, adds in the fun of using a theme, but those are the basic factors that will convince me to use a theme. However sometimes the themes can look so beautiful or maybe so well optimized for search engines that I am willing to overlook some of the favorite features mentioned.
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