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Posts Tagged ‘theme design’

Searching Google for "free WordPress themes" returns 47,700,000 results. That is 47.7 million – far too many to look through to find one that suits you. When you are just getting started with your blog, you are tempted to look for a theme that will fit the content of your site.

How much time do you spend searching, installing, testing and playing with a theme until you grow tired of it and start the process all over? Maybe you found a list of sites to choose themes and keep going back there to try more of them, with most of the themes being free.

Eventually you will want to set yourself apart from the other blogs. When that happens, you will either:

• Buy a theme, which countless others have too
• Hire someone to customize a theme for you, but at what expense?
• Learn to customize themes yourself, but which theme to start with and how much time do you have to put into it while the content suffers?

I have used plenty of free themes and learned to customize them, to a point. Some themes are tougher to work with than others, especially those that have everything defined in one or two files to display the articles and pages.

Looking at this blog, I have been told to change it and make it look more like the other high-traffic blogs. But why would I want to do that, when the whole idea is to stand out and be unique? Yes it took me several days to get it this far and there are some things I want to do with it yet when time permits. However, I will not fall for the idea that it should look like the other sites.

Instead, I prefer to be unique, both in design and delivery. Since this blog is hosted on a sub-domain, it does not rate high in the search engines. That lets me know that the visitors who come here are truly looking for the information I offer, rather than high visitor counts, mostly coming from the search engines, who just land on one page and leave.

The design is different than any other, because I personally compiled the graphics and layout. Of course it would have been much easy using a program such as Artisteer than doing it by hand, but I did not know about Artisteer when designing this site. Since learning about Artisteer, I used it to design StockMarketMasters.com and am very happy with the results.

So you choose how you want your WordPress blog to look. Do it without taking too much time away from building content, because it is the content that will bring visitors, not necessarily the design. The only exception is if your design is so unique that people will tell others just to look at it.

When they do, they will not be referring to your content and the visitors will most likely not be reading it. That is fine if you are selling designs, but not if you are selling or providing anything else.

Since Artisteer works for WordPress, Joomla, Drupal and stand-alone (non-blogging) sites, at least download a free trial and see for yourself how creative you can be with it. Above all, stand out from the crowd!

While there are many free WordPress themes from which to choose for your own blog, you may not find one that exactly suits your needs. If that describes you, then learning how to design your own theme may be what you are looking for.

Tessa Blakeley Silver wrote an instructional manual named WordPress Theme Design. It is intended to be a complete guide to creating professional WordPress themes, with practical step-by-step instructions for theme design.

Included are development tools for setting up your WordPress sandbox, design tips and suggestions, setting up the template structure for your theme, coding markup, tips on testing, debugging and taking it live, reviewing the best practices.

Shriharsha Bhat of Packt Publishing said, “This book walks through clear, step-by-step instructions to build a custom theme for the WordPress open-source blog engine. The author provides design tips and suggestions and covers setting up the WordPress sandbox, and reviews the best practices from setting up the theme’s template structure, through coding markup, testing, and debugging, to taking it live.”

“The last three chapters cover additional tips, tricks, and various cookbook recipes for adding popular site enhancements to WordPress theme designs using 3rd-party plugins as well as creating API hooks to add custom plugins.”

Learn more about WordPress Theme Design by visiting Amazon.com.

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Jim Hutchinson
Website Managers, LLC
Discount WordPress Blog Hosting