Tips for Choosing a Theme
Posted on January 17, 2008
Filed Under Beginning Blogging |
Now the fun begins, you will need to choose a blog platform and then a theme. Look back at your blog plan and remember what your audience looks like. You will want to choose a theme that is appealing to your audience as well as you. Other’s may disagree but I have found that if I don’t like my blogs theme, I don’t want to spend much time working on it so I choose themes that I like even if I have to sacrifice a few other things.
Next pull out the list of things you liked about the other blogs. Try to categorize them into larger categories such as headers I liked, colors I liked, layouts I liked, etc. Once you have them categorized in broad categories, start choosing what you liked best in each category. Review your purpose or mission statement just to keep it fresh in your mind when you are looking at themes and make a short list of the things you need your theme to do or accomodate.
By now you should have a good idea of what you want to look for in a theme. It’s time to go shopping. If you are self hosting your blog, you can just type WordPress themes into google and come up with a list that will keep you busy for awhile.
If you are new to blogging and are starting out on Blogger or WordPress.com, your choices will be somewhat limited to what is available there. I believe that WordPress has a much better selection but you might find the perfect one on Blogger.
Alvin Phang on GatherSuccess has a list of 4 Important Tips to Find a Blog Theme. His first suggestion is to choose a theme that has 3 columns. It’s one of the things that you will probably want to check on your list. Did your favorite themes have 2 columns or 3 or 4?
Other suggestions are to choose themes whose colors are not glaring or dark, however, if your audience is the younger set, they might easily like a black or purple background better. It also might do better for a “techy” blog. Color is mostly a personal choice and you can go back to your list and check which colors you liked best.
There are several WordPress themes that are SEO optimized. They are coded to maximize your search engine effectiveness and are worth taking a look at closely. Once you find a theme you like, try to find a blog that is using it and then search for that blog in Google. Take a look at how google sees the blog. The theme has a lot of control over whether Google indexes the post title, or the categories or tags. Court’s Internet Marketing has some SEO Themes that have been optimized and debugged.
If you are self hosting your own blog, the choices in themes are infinite but also riskier. I have tried out and loved a couple of themes that had some issues and the support was non existent so I ended up changing to another theme. When you have a pretty good idea what theme you want, check out the support pages for it and see if there are more cries for help than answers.
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