Creating the design for a website can be a complicated and time consuming project for people who are experienced with this type of work. For those who do not have the experience or knowledge to design their own site, they may avoid trying altogether. Fortunately, completely inexperienced designers can actually create their own customized websites using WordPress themes.
What are WordPress themes?
WordPress, or WP, is a free, open source content management system that makes it easy for people without web design experience to create and manage their own customized site. Inexperienced site designers can simply focus on content creation instead of trying to fumble through complicated programming or graphics creation.
The actual design aspect of a WordPress site is controlled by themes, which are basically website templates. While a typical website template only offers a set site design, these theme templates actually integrate with WP. This integration allows many different aspects about the theme to be controlled from the administration section of the website instead of requiring complicated code editing.
The look of a website is easily considered to be one of the most important aspects for both the site owner and website traffic. An unappealing site can actually drive away traffic or keep them from focusing on the important content of the site. This makes themes extremely appealing because they give site owners access to professional web design work for free or a very affordable price.
Some of these themes will not allow a lot of customization, but others can be the exact opposite. The best of these themes may have numerous design templates to choose from, while also allowing graphics, text styling, and color choices to be customized as needed. This allows beginners to have the ability to build their own site, since all of this customization is simplified by the theme.
A WP theme can also offer even more advanced options for users who do have web design knowledge. These advanced options can allow for custom coding to be added to the template for a variety of reasons. Even though experienced users could just build a site manually, using a content management system like WordPress and themes to control the site design can help them save a lot of time.
Where to find a theme
Unfortunately, there is not a single centralized location where people can search all available WordPress themes to download for their site. The closest thing to this is the WordPress repository, which contains free, open source themes and plugins that have been developed by WP users. The repository can be searched through WordPress.org or the administration section of any WP site.
The most important thing to remember when it comes to choosing a theme is to find one that was made for the same version of WP. To a certain extent, the version numbers may not need to be an exact match, but it is important to ensure that a theme isn’t outdated. In general, a theme originally made for a branch of WordPress 2 shouldn’t be used on a site running a branch of the 3rd version.
The default theme that comes with WP is a decent theme which allows some customization, but there are even better ones that can be found in the repository, like the Weaver theme, which offer many more options. These more complex alternatives can take some time to get used to using, but they will allow inexperienced site designers to customize things on their site that would ordinarily be nearly impossible to do.
In addition to the WP repository, one of the other recommended ways to find a theme is to use a search engine. People who are searching for a specific type of design for their site will likely have a hard time being successful using the repository, but a search engine can find other options that may not be available or easily found in the repository.
That being said, some popular free themes include:
Twenty Ten is fully customizable, easy to use and included in the default WordPress installation.
Atahualpa has a difficult name, but it offers are a lot of features that make it very customizable while remaining well in the reach of beginners.
Premium WordPress themes
Even though there are quite a few free themes for WordPress available in the repository and elsewhere on the internet, there are also many different commercial or premium themes. They will generally have a one-time price to buy them to use on an unlimited number of domain names, although some of them may have monthly fees or even charge for each domain name.
Most people will want to make their WordPress site for free. However, premium WP themes can actually offer a number of advantages for site owners. The most obvious of these advantages is the variety of features that are typically available for users. In general, the actual quality of the web design work in the templates is much higher with a commercial product.
Although the power of a premium theme for WordPress is usually the most appealing aspect, there is one other thing that is extremely important that many site owners do not consider until it is too late. The core WP software is constantly being developed by many people, so new versions are continually released.
As the core WP software gets improved, new features are generally added, and old features may be removed. The result of this development causes other additions, like themes, to eventually break if it is not kept up to date with changes to the WordPress core script. A site owner simply cannot depend on the developer of a free, open source theme to keep it current.
Commercial alternatives are constantly updated to ensure the happiness of their customers and to allow them to continue to sell their product. As a result, websites can possibly end up with a broken website design after upgrading WP to a new version, and they may not be able to get the problem fixed unless they are using a premium theme.
Finally, it is a lot easier to find premium themes that are optimized for certain types of marketing. For example, some are setup to offer the best product reviews, one’s own products or digital products.
Popular premium themes for affiliate marketers
Socrates: Developed by and for marketers, it comes monetized for AdSense and ClickBank. It also has tools for SEO. It includes lifetime upgrades and support and claims to have the best support forum for any theme.
Genesis: This framework, offered by Studio Press, is extremely popular and claims over 60,000 users. One single price offers unlimited websites, updates and support. It is search engine optimized and offers many designs to choose from as well as almost every customizing option in the industry.
Thesis by DIYthemes: This is another very popular theme that offers great control. It makes it possible to control virtually every bit of code without knowing coding and produce very unique designs. It offers personal as well as developer options that both include lifetime upgrades.
