How To Choose A Premium Wordpress Theme
Installing a premium Wordpress theme can be one of the fastest and easiest ways to really improve the looks of your Wordpress web site.
Because Wordpress is free you don't have to waste your money purchasing it,so with the money you'll save you can very well afford to purchase a great looking premium theme—and it'll still be at a lower cost than a custom-designed web site.
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| iTheme bSocial Theme |
A lot of people can put together a free theme and offer it to the public, but it requires a lot more skill, care, and dedication on the part of the creator to design themes people are actually willing to pay money for.
One the other hand, just because you pay for a theme doesn't necessarily mean it's worth what you paid for it. There are some bad premium themes, some good premium themes, and some great premium themes. And even the good and great ones may not provide what you need to exactly fill your needs.
This article is geared towards helping you make informed and intelligent decisions when choosing premium themes.
Some items we will discuss:
1. Things you should consider and plan for before you even start looking at themes.
2. How can you best assess a theme's quality?
3. What you should be getting for your money when you purchase a premium Wordpress theme.
Section 1: Needs, Wants, and Expectations
The first thing you should do when selecting a premium theme is to gauge your own needs, wants, and expectations. You most certainly can't pick the right theme if you don't even know what's right for you and what you really need.
So, first step, before you jump in and start looking at all of the really cool themes and get all excited about the really fancy designs, you need to figure out exactly what it is that you really need and want. What do you want your site to look like, and what do you want it to do?
And even before you do that first step, you should probably understand exactly what you're getting when you purchase a premium theme.
What, exactly, makes a theme a premium theme?
No discussion on premium themes would be complete if it didn't answer a very basic question: What, exactly, is a premium theme?
There are a lot of different opinions out there on what a premium theme should provide, including but not limited to: customization, documentation, support, higher quality code, better “design” work, etc.
What it really amounts to though is that a premium theme is simply a theme you pay for, it's as simple as that. All the other potential extras and goodies that you may get with the theme that you purchase depend on what the creator of the theme actually delivers to you.
It's a fact, not all premium theme creators are equal, and so it follows that not all premium themes are equal. Everyone has a different opinion on what makes a theme outstanding and worthy of the "premium theme" title.For instance, one premium theme creator may have a ton of professional experience while another may only produce themes as a sideline or hobby. Both may produce themes that are equally good but you'll get a different experience from each.
If you elect to buy a theme from a hobbyist you shouldn't expect the levels of support a pro-theme creator can offer. If you buy a theme from a company that offers premium themes as a sideline, you might get terrible or non-existant service. These are things you need to consider before shelling out your money.
Bottom line, do your research, don't let slick marketing and hyped up sales jargon fool you, and make your decision based on facts.
What do you need in a website, what do you need it to do?
Before you start picking and buying themes you need to make some preliminary decisions. If you don't do your homework now, you will probably end up regretting it later. The most important thing to figure out right now is what you need your website to do.
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| iTheme Corporate Theme |
• Do you need blog capabilities on your site (news, portfolio, press releases, catalog, etc.)?
• Does your site need a specific call to action (such as an e-commerce component)?
• How many pages will your site need?
• Will those pages need a hierarchy as far as the menu system goes?
• What do you want to show or feature on your homepage?
These are the sort of questions you need to answer now. You're trying to figure out exactly what you need from your website. Once you have that sorted out, it becomes much easier to find a theme that offers what you need.
What kind of theme should you buy?
One of the most common mistakes people make in choosing a theme is assuming it will fit their needs. Premium themes come in all shapes and sizes and colors and have a wide variety of features available. Some focus in on a very specific need while others focus on generic blogging.
Some themes are designed to put the focus on the content that is on the web site. At the other end of the spectrum are the corporate themes. These tend to focus on static pages and relegate the blog type content to a small news section . The key here is to not make assumptions about what the theme will or won't do, check it out and make sure.
And remember, just because Wordpress is a blogging platform doesn't mean that any theme will be great for blogging. Wordpress is extremely flexible and highly customizable and more and more themes are focusing on sites that don't focus on blogging at all.
What features do you need?
Before you start shopping for themes you need to decide what features you need from your theme. Some features may appeal to you when you read about the theme and view the site demo, but if you don't really need them then you may possibly be paying for something you'll never use.
In some cases those fancy features could actually interfere with or conflict with what you do actually need. Finding the right theme for your needs before purchasing it is much more practical than finding and purchasing a cool looking theme and having to bend and sacrifice your needs to make it work.
Here are just a few examples of some features that are available on premium themes:
• Option to have a featured post on the home page instead of the latest post
• Featured photographs from Flickr and others
• Featured video(s) from YouTube and others
• Advertising integration (Adsense, etc)
• Advertising management features available
• Optional color themes to choose from and implement
• Control panels for easily adding tracking code or feed URLs
• Header image replacement, resizing, and cropping capabilities
• Contact form (so you don't expose your email address to spammers)
• Tabbed sidebars
• Tabbed featured posts
• Multiple position choices for sidebars and widget capable sidebars
• Multiple page layouts
• Menus auto generated from Wordpress pages
• Menus auto generated from categories
• Menus generated from the blogroll if desired
• Manual menu control
• Drop down menus
• Built in asides / sideblog
• Advanced search functionality
• Niche specific templates; e.g. real estate, auto sales, photography, news, etc
• E-commerce integration if desired
• Image / banner rotation if desired
• Reordering the home page
• Alternative graphics packs
• And more...
Not all themes will include all of the features shown above, and you also won't need or use all of the above features. That's why you need to determine in advance what features you need.
How much customization are you really capable of and comfortable with?
If the very thought of writing or changing code or installing and activating plugins makes you nervous, you better make sure you pick a theme that has everything you need right out of the box. On the other hand, if you're OK with writing or tweaking code, installing plugins or adjusting the CSS, then you can be a lot more flexible when you choose a theme.
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| iTheme Grunge Theme |
A lot of the features shown above are built right into a lot of premium themes, and many of them can easily be added to themes with plugins that are readily available. If you're at ease making changes and installing plugins yourself, it will give you a little more leeway in choosing a theme you like but which doesn't have each and every feature you wish to have.
Next up, we'll go over specific details on what to look for when choosing your premium theme.
Section 2: Assessing Quality
In Section 1 we covered setting expectations and deciding on what you really need from a theme. In this section we're going to look at some areas you should pay close attention to when you find a theme you like.
As mentioned previously, there is no standard for premium themes. The term "premium" means different things to different people. In my opinion though,it's still reasonable to expect a high level of quality in a theme that you pay money for.
The question becomes.... just what is a high quality theme?
As with many other things, "the devil is in the details". You will need to throughly examine the demo page, source code, tutorials, and any other details a premium theme creator offers when looking for the measures of quality listed below.
Valid code
One way you can assess a theme's quality is to see how it stacks up against industry standards. You can use online tools to compare the page construction to specific code standards. The HTML markup validator (http://validator.w3.org) should be run on the key pages, including the home page, single post page, category page, etc. If all goes well you will see a statement that says the page has passed. If it fails, the validator will report the number of errors.
The CSS validator (http://jigsaw.w3.org/css-validator/) only needs to be run on the home page, because the CSS
style information will be the same across the entire site.
The CSS validator will normally list both errors and warnings. Usually you can ignore the warnings, and getting errors doesn’t necessarily mean the theme is a bad one. There are some situations where errors simply cannot be avoided; however, you should generally expect few errors.
Browser compatibility
All themes should be compatible with the major browsers. The author should provide you with info about the browsers their theme is compatible with. If the author's website doesn't say his themes are compatible, you should ask rather than assume.
Internet Explorer 6, Internet Explorer 7, Firefox, Safari and Opera are the main browsers a theme should be
compatible with. Test the theme in as many browsers as possible to determine if there are things that don't quite work the way they should on any particular browser. Be skeptical of a theme that doesn't look just right in any of the major browsers.
Styling
In any web site there are a lot of different elements that can be designed with a specific look and style. Perhaps there are different styles for each level of header or perhaps pull quotes are treated with a special graphic. Check to see if these elements are styled in any theme you're considering. That will give you a good idea of the level of detail the theme author has included.
Look through the demonstration pages for examples of the following:
• Headers, levels 3 to 5
• Blockquotes / pull quotes
• Code blocks
• Tables
• Numbered lists
• Bulleted lists
• Nested lists
• Definition lists
• Images, particularly the spacing around them if they are included within the text
• Links (click on links to see how they behave and how they look after being clicked)
If the demo site doesn't include an example of these in any of the posts or pages, then contact the themes author and request that they add a post that contains them. You just never know, for instance, when you might need to include a table, and there is nothing that looks worse than a poorly styled table.
There normally will be a default style for all of these items, so it is unlikely they will be unstyled, but you're really checking to make sure you're satisfied with the way these elements are styled.
Typography
One thing a theme must do well is to make your content easy to read. A good theme designer will have considered the type in some detail to decide what is an appropriate font size and line spacing, among other things.
The following points are a general guide to assist you in determining if type styles and sizes are appropriate.
First, simply read through a few of the pages. If you find them difficult to read for any reason, then that's an obvious indication that something isn't right.
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Another thing you should look for is a regular rhythm. Consistent spacing between paragraphs, headers, and
lists will create a rhythm on the page that makes it easier to read. Frequently asked questions (FAQ) pages
can be used for judging rhythm because they most often have a number of headers and short answers all visible on screen at the same time.
Finally, it is a good idea to compare the theme's typeface to some sites you regularly visit and read to see if it stacks up and decide whether or not any differences are warranted.
Comment styling
If you plan on letting users leave comments on your site, you should check the way the comment section works. You can leave a few comments on the demo theme to see how it handles comments.
Trackbacks are pretty useless when they appear within a comment thread. Most readers don't like wading through piles of trackbacks to find the comments in between them. A well thought out theme would separate them, or at least provide that as an option.
It's also good practice to make the authors’ comments appear different than those of visitors and to include gravatars (globally recognized avatars) for every comment. If you're planning on using the site for business, you probably will want to have the option of turning the gravatars off. Be sure you find out how the theme handles that. Does it leave an empty space, or does it look as though the gravatars were never there?
You should also check to see how a theme handles a post when comments are turned off and whether or not it displays a message when comments are moderated.
Pages
The Wordpress theme API allows specific page types to have their own templates. This feature means the information that is displayed on a page can be tailored specifically to the need. You should visit the following types of pages and see how the themes author has used this functionality:
• The home page (see if it is the same as a single post?)
• Any single post
• A category page
• A tag page
• A static page (such as the about page or contact us page)
• The search page
• Monthly archive page
• Sitemap (If there is one)
When viewing these pages you should pay particular attention to the content of each post; i.e. is it an excerpt or is it showing a full post? Full posts might possibly make your site less effective with search engines since you can have multiple pages with the same content.
You should also pay close attention to the way you navigate between pages. Are there links from each post on the category page to the monthly archive page, or to the tag page for the tags that apply to that post? If there is more than one page of results, are the default next/previous page links used? Hopefully the theme author has gone that little bit further and included a list of page numbers so you can quickly navigate straight to page five?
Next, check the error pages. What happens when you search for a term and there are no results? What shows up when you change the URL to try to access a page that doesn't exist, or a post that doesn't exist?
Pay close attention to the details as well. In addition to post titles, does it also display authors, dates, categories, etc.? When it gives an excerpt of a post is there a user-friendly "read more" link of some type?
Most of these cases apply to blog-type content, but even if you're not all that concerned about blog functionality you'll probably want to see how the pages use the sidebar or widgets. For instance,is the sidebar the same on every page or is there some type of variation?
Theme options panels and commented code
It is quite possible that you will want to amend the theme to some extent, so you need to know how easy it will be to do that. Hopefully,the theme will provide you with a Theme Options (administrative) panel that will let you swap out images, change the feed URL, add in tracking code, choose between various color schemes, or control your menu. You will definitely want to know the details concerning the functionality that would be available to you without changing any code.
When you do need to change the code, a great theme will provide detailed comments in the source code to make it as easy as possible. Since comments will rarely show up in the source view, you won’t be able to check this without the original files. It can't hurt to ask the themes author for a sample of a relatively standard section of code so that you can see what kind of comments it contains.
As you can see there’s a lot of things for you to think about here.
It's not likely that a theme will be perfect in all of the points raised, and different theme authors will have different views on the importance of each one. It's therefore possible you may have to compromise on one feature in order to get another more necessary one.
At this point in time, you should know how to gauge a theme’s quality, which will be a tremendous help in picking a theme that is right for you.
In the final part of the discussion we’ll consider the value of a good theme.
Section 3: What Do I Get For My Money?
In Section 1 we discussed finding out what your needs and wants are and setting your expectations. Section 2 looked at how to go about determining the quality of a theme. In this section we'll take a look at what you actually get when you purchase a premium theme.
What you actually get when you purchase a premium theme may vary significantly between sellers. Some theme authors are simply out to sell themes while others are trying to build a business around it and are willing and eager to provide everything you will need to get the best out of your theme.
The prices may possibly differ between the two, but not necessarily in the way you would expect. There doesn't seem to be a lot of correlation between the price of the theme and the extras you get. The extras aren't always listed, so you may need to ask what's included and what's not included.
Page templates
Page templates are technically a part of any theme and you'll get them anyway, but we're including them here because it's not always evident what kind of page templates are included.
When you write a page in WordPress you will have the option of applying a page template to it. The templates can be very minor variations on the basic theme. As an example, it might have the sidebar on the opposite side of the page, or no sidebar at all.
Where these page templates really start to do some important work for you is when they represent alternative core functionality.
Wordpress allows you to replace the default home page with a different page if you wish. If the theme author has provided page templates with different styles of home page, you can apply these to a Wordpress page of your choosing and assign it to be your home page to change the way the theme works.
If you purchase a theme that was intended to be used as a normal website instead of a blog, the default home page may not show any of your posts. If you should later decide you want a normal blog it's easy to make the change if the theme’s author has provided a blog style page template.
If the theme does include page templates they may be limited to different styles of home page, or they may include more variations such as pages that have a featured post at the top, several variations on sidebar position, multiple posts in different layouts, etc.
Instructions
With a new theme you will probably have choices for new ways of putting your content together. Features such as adding an image to represent the post, changing the theme header, or using images with captions can be difficult to figure out at times without some guidance from the themes author.
The quality and quantity of the instructions you get with a premium theme can vary widely. You may only get a "read me" file in the theme itself, or you may get multiple video demos of the functionality and even tutorials in PDF format.
Although you are not necessarily paying extra for these instructions, and very often they are available free on the website as tutorials (which makes them an excellent source of information before you buy), they can absolutely make the difference between a new theme that works well and one that just causes you a lot of headaches and frustration, so it's worth considering what kind of instructions are available as part of the cost.
Photoshop files
Even if the instructions are detailed and you know how to change the header, actually changing it without the original Photoshop files can be difficult at best. You may need to find the correct dimensions, determine what typeface the original is in, duplicate all the styles involved, etc., so having a Photoshop file to work from can make it a whole lot easier.
In some cases a Photoshop file is included with the theme by default, and may not even be mentioned as a selling point. In other cases you will have to pay extra for it and you will then need to decide whether it is worth the extra cost or not.
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| iTheme iRealEstate Theme |
For those simple themes where the header is a regular background image, there isn't necessarily a need for it. For more complicated themes, especially those where the header text is a key component, it can be very difficult to do without it.
Compatibility with feature upgrades?
The theme you buy should be compatible with whatever version of Wordpress you are currently using, or that you are planning on using, but what happens when Wordpress upgrades, which they do quite often?
If a feature is changed in Wordpress or a new feature is added (tagging and sidebars are good examples of relatively recent feature additions) the theme may need to be updated to match the new version of Wordpress. The important question is whether you are entitled to a free upgrade of the theme or not.
The themes themselves most likely won't remain without change either. Customer feedback and requests and new trends mean that themes will likely add new features or change their look over time.
You may possibly be entitled to get new versions that have been upgraded for compatibility free of charge, or you may be entitled to any new version that comes out, also free of charge, or you may be required to pay extra to upgrade to the next version.Support
When you ask what a premium theme includes, the answer usually mentions support of some kind. If you pay for something, you normally expect support if it doesn't work. How much support you will actually get, and on which issues and problems, can vary, though.
Some premium theme sellers offer their customers forums to cover basic support issues. These forums normally aren't something you will have to pay for and they are a way of taking support responsibility away from the author, but they can also be very helpful for finding your answers. I have found forums to be an excellent means of quickly getting questions answered and problems solved.
If there aren't any forums provided, or they fail to answer your question, you'll need direct support from the themes author. If you're using the theme as it was intended, on a compatible version of Wordpress, and something just simply isn't working right, then basic support is normally available.
If, on the other hand, you have made any changes to the theme code or are trying to change it to make it work with an earlier version of Wordpress, it is by no means certain that you will get help from the themes author.
Providing support can be time consuming and very expensive for the theme creator. Just a few hours a day providing free support to customers can put a huge dent in their income. For that very reason, you shouldn't automatically expect a theme author to provide endless support on everything you want to do simply because you have purchased a theme from them.
To wrap it all up:
As you now know, there's a whole lot of things to consider if you want to get the most out of a premium theme.
• First you have to sort out your own needs, wants, and expectations.
• Next you need to assess what a theme has to offer you, and will it match your needs.
• Finally you need to know what you're paying for.
The good news is that most premium themes are not really very expensive, all things considered. Despite being inexpensive, however, not all premium themes live up to that cost, whatever it might be.
So.....consider your needs and wants, do your research, and you will be in a position to make an intelligent and informed decision on choosing that perfect theme for your web site.
For more information on this and other items of interest, visit my web sites at:
Lewis Poteet
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