The True Power of Twitter – Marketing Essentials
Let’s talk about WordPress Themes. Making a decision for the theme for your site is crucial. Most people, when choosing a theme, just look for the one that looks the best. This is a huge mistake, because the theme contains a lot more code besides appearance, and it influences a lot on the website that is important to consider.
One thing that is very important for your site is that the code is clean and as a simple as possible. It is critical so that your site runs at the fastest speed that it can. Have you ever been to a site that loads incredibly slow? It is most likely due to the poor coding job. The speed also affects the SEO of the site.
Many themes come with some built in customization. One of the questions you need to ask when choosing a theme is not just which customization you want to use now, but which ones you may want to use in the future. If your theme doesn’t come with a specific customization you want you will need to pay a programmer to create that for you.
Another thing that is really important when choosing a theme is to see which plugins the theme works with (or more importantly doesn’t work with.) Many of the themes that have less options may not work with certain plugins that you are planning to use. (Also, make sure theme is responsive to work on mobile and tablet!)
All of these aspects effect how good your site is, and you most think about all of them when choosing a theme. So how do you know which theme will be the best for you?
The answer is that you can never truly do enough homework, because you can’t really know how well it will work until you have been using the theme for several months. So, the best option is to look around and get a list of the top 3 themes you have found, then do three things:
- Reach out to the company and ask them what their worst and best features are. Doing this lets you know if the company is responsive at all to your needs, as well as if you missed something while you were learning more about the theme.
- Read tons of reviews from current users to see how they like the theme. If they are enjoying it, and the updates several months, or even years into using the theme, it is safe to assume that you should be okay using it.
- See how often the theme is updated. Seeing that a theme is updated means that company is on top of problems and will fix them quickly when they arise.
Once you have done that you will hopefully have your winner.
I personally went through this process for about 4 weeks and found a theme I truly love, called “The 7” by Dream Theme (which just released their 3rd big update today).
Next time you choose a theme, don’t just look for the one that looks like it can work for now, because you most likely will not want to change themes later. Sometimes when you have chosen a theme your site and it’s content will not be compatible with a different theme, so it will be much harder to change to a different one down the line.
FINAL NOTE: Many themes are free, but as you can see a theme is a much bigger deal than many people assume. This is why I personally believe it will almost always be worth it to pay money for your theme, it will pay itself off big time down the line!
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