Aspects of Home Business Blog

Hunting for the right theme for a blog takes a lot of time. It’s not all that easy to find something that will do exactly what you want it to do and look how you want it to. These are some of the things you want to consider:

Columns

Most themes have at least two columns. I generally go for 3 columns, occasionally even 4 if it’s well made.

You also need to think on how the columns are set up. My current theme has sidebars to the right and to the left. But having all sidebars to the right has become rather popular in blogging. You’ll see quite a bit of that.

Colors

While I do strongly recommend that you customize your header image when present, the overall color of a theme matters. If you find one that has more or less the color scheme you want, it’s a lot less work to adapt it than having to find in all the CSS where you need to switch the colors.

Width

Some people like fixed width, while others want it to adapt to the size of their visitors’ monitors. It’s a matter of personal preference, but do consider your user base. If you find by looking at your stats over time that most of your visitors have a lower resolution to their monitor, a wider theme probably isn’t for you. Similarly, too many users with really high resolution monitors can be trouble if you have variable width.

Required Links

Just about all free Wordpress themes will require that you keep a link to the designer in the footer or elsewhere. It’s good form to comply with this request, and if such is stated in the terms, the designer can insist that you take the theme off your site if you don’t comply.

Make sure the links are ones you can stand. Some free theme designer sell their footer links to others, and you can end up linking to all kinds of spammy sites.
You will also want to know if there’s anything more being added to your site than is immediately obvious. Check the footer file for anything odd. Search for hidden links. There’s nothing good to come of the search engines blaming you for links to bad neighborhoods.

Overall Function

I’ve seen some Wordpress themes look great on the index page, and have problems on other pages. I’ve seen some that don’t bother including navigation on individual post pages.

Check everything as soon as you try a theme on your blog. Check it on as many browsers as you can on your own. BrowserShots.org is a great help for this. It gives you screenshots of how your page looks in a wide range of browsers and operating systems. It may take from minutes to hours to generate your results, but it’s far simpler than finding a way to check out your site in so many browsers on your own.

But I still recommend doing it live as much as you can.

Search Engine Optimization

Not all themes do anything with this, so it’s a nice bonus when you can find it. If not, there are a variety of plugins that can help you to do the important things yourself, such as displaying appropriate page titles.

Themes That Have Recently Caught My Eye

While I don’t change themes too often, I’m not 100% satisfied with all the themes I’m using on other sites. So I took this time to find some new favorites.

Gridline Light
Very clean and probably easy to adapt to a wide range of website styles, which is always a big help.

Smashing Theme
If I chose this one for a project, I’d no doubt change or remove the overall background image. Just not quite my style, really. But I do like the rest of it quite well.

xPlosive Reloaded
You may quickly be noting my preference for 3 columns. I like the flexibility of having several things clearly visible in the sidebars. On this one I particularly like the emphasized subscription area. I would probably move and shrink the search box, and make it into an email subscription form.

WP Premium
It looks good to me. Easy to add 125×125 ads if you like, for either selling advertising or affiliate marketing.

Ayumi
Not 100% wild about the particular shade of green, but it looks easy to adapt. Another one where I’d be using some of the wider sidebar space to really emphasize the RSS and email subscription options.

If none of these suit you, there are plenty more available for free download at the Wordpress site. And remember that one of the great things about Wordpress is that it is incredibly easy to test and discard themes. I have a folder dedicated to the ones I’ve downloaded onto my computer, yet I use very few of them.