WordPress Themes
WordPress Themes are a great way to customize the look and feel of your WordPress blog. A WordPress theme can control not only the fonts and colors in which your text will appear, but even the entire layout of your site.
By switching from one theme to another, you can completely transform the appearance of your site - including the layout of your posts, pages, headers, footers, sidebars, and more - without impacting WordPress itself, and without having to change any of your content. For most WordPress bloggers, the choice of a theme is the single most important decision they will make.
Premium WordPress Themes
While there are plenty of free WordPress themes, separating the good themes from the bad can be hard to do, especially if you are a blogger, and not a web developer or designer. Because that difficulty has created market demand, a few theme developers are now selling and supporting their themes. These themes that are actively developed, sold, and supported have come to be known as “Premium WordPress Themes.”
Some folks in the WordPress community would prefer for these themes to be known as “Commercial” WordPress Themes, but I think the “Premium” adjective is hear to stay. If you are looking for a Premium Theme, it is highly likely that what you want is a professionally designed theme from a company that will provide ongoing upgrades and active support for its customers.
Best WordPress Themes
As a blogger, you want a theme that best reflects the image you want to convey through your writing. But what makes one WordPress theme better than another? And how do you decide on the best theme for your blog? Beyond the initial impression that a theme makes, here are some of the import characteristics of the best WordPress themes:
Search Engine Optimization
No matter how good your content is, and no matter how good your blog looks, every blog needs an audience. And for many blogs, that audience will come from search engines. So your blog needs to be structured in a way that leads to successful indexing by search engines and good placement in search results. In general, WordPress works quite well with search engines. At the same time, the degree to which it works well is influenced by its theme, and some themes (often very good looking ones, unfortunately) work against this underlying strength of WordPress.
Pleasing Typography
While some blogs benefit from flashy backgrounds and clever color schemes, the vast majority of blogs are better served by simply being readable and easy on the eyes. That means using a theme that employs cascading style sheets that define typographic characteristics in a way that works on all the popular browsers, at a wide variety of resolutions. And one that defines font sizes in a way that isn’t fixed at a certain point size, so that your blog content can be resized as the user sees fit.
Easy Customization
Unless you are a web designer, you probably aren’t terribly comfortable making changes to PHP code, Cascading Style Sheets, or any of the other files that make up a WordPress theme. Fortunately, more and more themes are providing configuration options that are visible within the WordPress Admin interface. The best themes provide configuration options to specify the number of columns and overall layout of your blog, the font and size of various elements, and so forth. The more configuration options provided by the theme, the less need there is to modify files.
Custom WordPress Themes
Until recently, one way to get the best possible WordPress theme was to hire a designer to create a custom theme to your specifications. And that can still be a good way to go, except for the cost involved. Good designers don’t come cheap. And many bloggers simply cannot justify spending hundreds, if not thousands, of dollars on a custom theme for their blog.
Fortunately, one benefit of the Premium Theme market is the availability of top-quality themes at a reasonable price. Now you can purchase a premium theme, often for less than one hundred dollars, use its customization options to get the look you want, and end up with a blog that looks every bit as good as most custom-created themes.
Thesis Theme
When I looked for the best WordPress theme for my blog, I kept seeing mention of a theme designer named Chris Pearson, who had recently released a premium WordPress theme named “Thesis.” Not wanting to spend a lot of money on a custom theme, I decided to check out this Thesis Theme to see if it would do the job.
After reading some Thesis Theme reviews, looking at sites in the Thesis Showcase, and evaluating its various features, I decided to purchase it and try it myself. As you can tell from this site, which uses the Thesis Theme, I’ve been very happy with Thesis and think that it provides great value. Take a look around, read some of the blog posts here, and decide for yourself if one of the Premium WordPress Themes like Thesis would be the best bet for your blog.
