You have decided that you are going to use WordPress for your site and now you need a theme to help move that process along. Before picking a theme there are 4 major things about your theme to consider. Form, Functionality, Customizability and Cost. Each one of these matters in a different way and by considering all of them when searching for the correct theme you will ensure that your site meets your needs.
Form. I am sure you have heard the old adage “form follows function” this is very true but since we are making a website and not a building. As your search for a WordPress theme you will realize that there is literally 10s of 1,000s of them so don’t tie yourself down with something you don’t like the look of just because of one feature. Plenty of fish in the see find a theme that looks like you want your site to look like. Look at the theme’s demo page to get a good ideal of what it looks like and if there is no demo site, skip over that theme and thank me later.
Functionality. Now you have to decide what kind of features you want your WordPress site to have. Responsiveness is one of the most important features you can get and by getting a responsive theme you are helping to future proof your site. Things like newsletters, social media connects and image sliders are all things that you can add using Plugins so skip over these as a functional advantage. Most importantly take a look in the demo at the shortcode page this will show you all the neato functionality tools.
Customizability. A good theme will have a nice page explaining how easy it is to change things like color, font and layout. More detail will be provided on that shortcode page we talked about. Sometimes a theme will be built on a framework and you should research about that framework, you might even find a YouTube video or two demonstrating how to customize it.
Cost. There are some free themes and then there paid themes, just paying for a theme does not make it better or even guarantee that it will work like you want. You should not let the cost of a theme deter you from choosing it, but you should factor it into the decision process. A good rule is that when a theme is free you will need to put in more work to make a design work and when you pay for one it should come with some instructions on how to use it.
Now that you know what to look for in a WordPress; the look, how it works, how much can you change it and the cost. A few good sites for themes are WordPress.org, Themeforest.net, Okaythemes.com and TemplateMonster.com
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