Choosing a Theme to Customize

Posted by Wonder

October 6, 2008

I’ve been told I chose the wrong theme for a beginner. They’re prolly right, they don’t call me “Wrong-way Wonder” fer nuthin’.

I did do some research before I chose this theme and I’ve just done some more today. I found some good advice a few places:

I thought eHow had the most complete and easy to understand advice.
And, I really liked what Paul had to say on the subject over at WordPress Ninja
For just straight up information about what a template is and consists of, I’d have to say the WordPress Codex does it best.

But, I didn’t really find the advice I was looking for on any of these sites or the other 30 or so that I looked at.

That’s probably because there is no “one size fits all” advice when it comes to choosing a WordPress theme. Blogging platforms, including WordPress, are used for so many purposes that there just aren’t any real simple answers when it comes to which theme will work best for you.

Your first consideration has to be “what is the purpose of this blog?”

You’re more than likely going to want a far different template for a business blog than a personal one. But, even narrowing it down that far doesn’t help much.

If it’s a business blog, your blog template choice may be dictated by whether you already have a business web site. If so, you might be smart to have a professionally designed template that matches or compliments your site.

Even if your business doesn’t have a web site yet, choosing a business blogging template should be influenced by your current business “brands” if you’ve established any. In the odd case that you’re just today starting your business and a weblog is the first thing you’re going to do, you still need to choose a business blog template with your business image in mind.

If you’re so lucky as to be doing a personal blog, then you obviously have a much wider choice of blog themes. However, you still need to think about your personal interests. If you’re already hooked on Flickr or YouTube, you’ll find there are templates that easily allow you to share those interests. A food template probably wouldn’t be the best choice for a diet blog, etc. Anyway, I’m sure you see where I’m coming from.

I think the second thing you should take into consideration when choosing a blogging template for any platform is your personal web skill level.

Some templates are very “widgetized”, making it very “point and click” to add posts and much more to your weblog. Other pre-made templates are not so simple to use and only allow the most basic posts unless you have an understanding of HTML and PHP.

The nicest thing about WordPress templates or themes is that there about a million of them out there already, many of them free. If you don’t make the right choice the first time, it’s a really simple matter to change your mind.

In fact, my best recommendation about a WordPress theme for beginners is that you start with a free template or four. You will learn the basics and you can always upgrade to a premium template if you feel the need.

On a personal level, the purpose of my blog is to “learn blogging”. I’m a wanna-be web designer and everyone I know seems to want a WordPress blog so I think I’d better know the whole shebang, upside down and backward even.

I chose the template I started with for the simple reason that it is a CSS based fluid and elastic template. My choice of web site designs at the moment, as well. I think I have the skills to pull it off and I’m sure I’ll be building my own “from scratch” in the near future so it wasn’t a huge consideration what I started with.

WordPress

Did you enjoy this post? Why not leave a comment below and continue the conversation, or subscribe to my feed and get articles like this delivered automatically to your feed reader.