9 Must Dos Before Choosing a WordPress Theme!

How to Choose a WordPress Theme – 9 Must Dos!

How to choose a WordPress theme may be the hardest part of your web design project. Trust me on that, I’ve spent hours searching being both frustrated and mesmerized by the myriad of WordPress themes available. In this article I’ll cover a few points that will help you identify the right WordPress theme for your website, quickly and easily. In a nutshell, I’ll give you a checklist that I use to help streamline the process.

By the way, this checklist could be applied to either free or commercial WordPress themes, but it’s typically worth it to spend the $25-50 bucks on a premium wordpress theme.

1. Have Realistic Expectations – You’re probably not going to find the perfect template that will accommodate your every desire, requirement and customization need, so manage your expectations.

2. Define Project Requirements – During your website project planning stage you probably identified specific requirements for your project. Most of time these are the driving force when choosing the wordpress theme. Here are few examples of project requirements that might dictate your theme selection:

Navigation menus i.e. topnav, dropdown, or left/right navbars, etc.
Support for social media, email tools, forms, photo galleries, videos, ecommerce or other specific functionality
Page layout i.e. full width, multi-column, sidebars, etc
Font requirements
Specific colors
Homepage layout and/or features like sliders, videos, flash and other special functionality
Designed for the browsers, tablets, devices and smart phones of your target audience

3. Check WordPress Compatibility – Sounds silly I know, but more accurately, I’d say make sure that the theme is compatible with the latest version of WordPress. You don’t want an older theme that doesn’t support the latest and greatest WordPress features.

4. Read Theme Reviews – Look for a theme and/or designer who has good to excellent reviews, either on their own website for from a website that sells themes from multiple designers. High reviews from a large number of users go along way in my book.

5. Check Documentation – Find out if there are step-by-step instructions or videos available, or better yet, and let me underscore this point, it is extremely valuable to have sample data available so you can easy replicate the theme demo.

6. Determine Customization Options – Don’t get crazy on this one, because its really subjective, and I usually suggest that you limit your customizations. But most website projects have the need to be able to control colors, logo inclusion along with some general graphical elements to maintain branding.

7. Check for Theme Updates – You can usually tell if the designer or developer is available because of a visible change log, commenting, updates or threads in the support forum. Nothing worse that finding the perfect theme only to find out that it has been abandoned by the author.

[note title="Recommendations" align="right" width="250"] Elegant Themes: Great value, dozens of themes for only $39, fantastic support, built in framework & excellent documentation.

Theme Forest: Many different theme designers to choose from, strict submission requirements, which ensures a high quality of theme and support, rating system to review purchaser feedback, hundreds of diverse and beautifully designed WordPress Themes.

List of Premium WordPress Themes: I’ve put together a massive list of premium themes to help shortcut your search. [/note]

8. Review Support – OK, inevitably this is a BIG DEAL. When it you are ready to launch your website and find out that something is broken, it is always so assuring to have someone who knows the theme and has your back. Check out their support forum before purchase or put together a list of questions prior to your purchase and send them to the developer. Let’s face it, its sucks trying to fit a square peg into a round hole.

9. Identify Value – Don’t get stuck searching for free wordpress themes, when you can spend $50 and solve a lot of potential time wasting problems.

Do I always follow the checklist?

Nope, but I’ve also spent hours trying to fix things because because I haven’t followed this how to choose a WordPress theme lesson. Hopefully this post will save you some grief and time and ultimately shortcut your web design project with WordPress.