PB119: How to Choose the Right WordPress Theme for Your Blog

How to Decide on a WordPress Theme for Your Blog Today I have a treat for you. Today we have a special guest, one of our new subject matter experts, Kelly Exeter from Swish Design. Kelly is one of those people who produces a heap of great content and also runs a business on the side. Kelly is one of the go to people in Australia when it comes to blog design. I received a question from Nils from Soul Thoughts who asks a question that many bloggers who are starting a blog. What is the best WordPress theme to choose for my blog (and how to make that decision). I’m not a designer, so I’m going to let our design expert Kelly share her tips on choosing the right WordPress Theme. You can either listen to the episode via the podcast player above or check it out on iTunes or Stitcher. Alternatively if you prefer to read - Kelly has written up the full show below for you to keep coming back to including all the links and resources mentiond in the episode. How to Choose the Right WordPress Theme for Your Blog Hello! I’m here today to try and answer this very big question: What are the best themes to use if you have a WordPress blog? And the very short answer to this is – there is no best theme. There are many themes out there that will work well for your needs. The hard part is narrowing down the list. If you type ‘WordPress themes’ into Google you will usually end up some place like ThemeForest where, at current count, there are over 6000 themes to choose from. Even somewhere with a slightly smaller selection like Elegant Themes has 87 on offer and Studiopress, the home of Genesis themes has over 50. So – how on earth do you choose the best theme for your needs from this wealth of choice? Well, my number one suggestion is to stop looking in those theme libraries and start instead with the blogs out there whose designs you love. Most WordPress themes these days are built on off-the-shelf templates which means that blog you love, you can access the same theme they’ve used. A quick word about this however – that blog you love – is it their header you particularly love? Or their typography? Or their imagery? If so, those are design elements that can be incorporated into any theme out there. When you’re deciding on a theme, you really need to choose one based on it having a layout you like – so you like how their logo and menu are placed, how their blog archives are laid out, how their blogs posts are laid out, and most importantly, what elements they have on their home page and where those elements are positioned. For example, if you choose the Metro Pro theme from Genesis – make sure you are choosing it because you like how it’s laid out … not because the demo has. So – let’s say you love the new Being Boss blog design at beingboss.club and you’re thinking that could work well for you. The first thing you want to do is find out what theme they’re using. You do this by viewing the source code of the website. To do this, type into your browser window: view-source:http://beingboss.club/ (NB: You can do this for any site by typing in view-source:FULLWEBSITEURL) Once you’re viewing the source code do a search for this: wp-content/themes. This will come up in a few places in the source code and the word that directly follows the word ‘themes’ in the source is the name of the theme. So for Being Boss, I can see their theme is called Art Mag. If you then Google ‘Art Mag Wordpress theme’ you’ll see it’s a theme you can buy from Themeforest for $49. A word of caution. When you’re checking out your favourite website, loving how it looks and you’re thinking I’m saying just buy the same theme and your site can look like that too, there is a giant caveat here. If you’re loving how a site looks, it’s probably because they have killer imagery. If you don’t have the same killer imagery, then use the same theme as them all you like, your site won’t look like theirs.