Choosing a Wordpress Theme
What is a theme?A theme is like a template - it's the visual design of your site. In Wordpress, the visual design is separate from your content, which makes it easy to install new "looks" for your site without knowing any HTML. When you change your theme, your same content will be displayed, just in a different layout.
What to consider in choosing a theme:
- Is it being actively developed? Wordpress releases new versions regularly, and bugs crop in any code. Is there a person or team behind the theme that will fix bugs and offer updates to the theme?
- Does it support widgets? Widgets are sections that go on the sidebar, and they are configurable in your admin - but only if the theme supports them. Most themes do, but some older themes might not.
- Do you like all the pages, not just the homepage? The theme is all the pages of your site - the homepage, individual posts, category pages, the search results page, date archive pages, and any informational pages you add. Make sure that you like or can work with all of it.
- Well-developed themes like Tarski will often have an options page that you can configure after you install the theme, so you can customize various parts of it - such as uploading your own header image or moving the sidebar from one side to the other.
Where do I look for themes?
The official wordpress theme repository is an obvious place, but many themes are not listed there, and it can be hard to find the theme you want. You can search on Google for "wordpress themes" and find a lot of sites cataloguing the best Wordpress themes, with good screenshots. You'll want to devote a chunk of time to looking through these sites in search of the perfect theme, and test drive the most likely candidates before selecting one. Another idea is to search on Digg to find up to date and popular themes.
Don't discount premium/commercial themes
While most themes are free, commercial themes like Ice Cream Dream are a good fit for some people, as they generally include support and are backed by a development team. They are also going to be shared by fewer other sites, giving you more branding uniqueness. They also usually are aimed at business users so they include easy ways to customize and brand the theme. Premium Wordpress is a good site to find commercial themes.
Themes for e-commerce or brochure sites
Most themes are built for blogs, but Wordpress can be used for other types of sites too. Many regular Wordpress themes can be set up for non-blog sites too, but there are themes that cater specifically to other types of sites. A search for "ecommerce wordpress theme" turns up a number of options (many commercial). Other searches to try are "business wordpress theme" and "magazine wordpress theme".
Simple themes that are good to build on
These are themes that are simple and clean and can make a great starting place to customize your theme (or leave as-is if you like the uncluttered look). Searching for "minimalist wordpress theme" will bring these up. One of the most basic is White as Milk. Another good source is this list of Free Business Wordpress Themes.
