The answer is depends on, it has to do with the purpose of your blog. If you are in the business that is serious about building the brand, make your products or service be known by the rest of the world. If you are in the affiliate marketing who treat affiliate business as a business etc, for the long term concern – yes, you need a professional designed theme for your blog. Spending some money for a well designed premium theme is reasonable.
Here are the two places to look for:
StudioPress – I love Brian’s themes – Marketingbyann is use his theme, I like it primarily is because his designs are fresh and fabulous and better yet, they encourage visitors to poke around the site longer.
His themes come with user-friendly, elegance uniquely-styled homepages, archives, section and post pages. I particularly like the ‘magazine’ look and feel of the Metro Theme homepage that you can display recent posts from categories of your choice, in any order you like.
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WP Remix – A WordPress powered master theme, is completely customizable, quality coded & comes bundled with many layout options that helps everyone create custom websites in minutes saves weeks of time, maintaining top notch standards – compliant quality.
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If the purpose of your blog is a personal focus instead of business, or if you just want it to be the place for you to dump the feelings, share whatever you want to share with others, then you may not need a professional designed wp theme. Again, it is really depends on individual’s preference. You can use the free themes, there are tons of them for you to choose to use, and you can find them at popular WordPress themes.
A well-structured WordPress theme will inevitably load your header first, then your content, follow by sidebars and footer. So when you choose a free theme, make sure it uses the header tag correctly. Also you need to make sure the free theme you choose to use does not limit you as your blog starts growing. Because with time, you may need to add new things and new features, some free themes out there may not offer you such flexibility for growth.
With professional designed themes like above two I just mentioned will not have this kind of problem.
Well, to help you save time, following are some of critical areas to look at in the process of your theme selection:
1. Speed and Loading Time
Many themes come with lots of bloated graphics – background image, icons, list images etc. Put your feet into your visitors shoes – what they want? the site look or the time it takes them to access your blog?
2. The Theme’s Size After Downloading
In every theme package, there is an image folder, so remember to check its size and also the stylesheet, style.css. The stylesheet gets loaded each time, so the smaller in size it is, the faster your page/blog loads, you can delete some of unnecessary features in which will put an extra load on your blog’s loading time.
3. Easy to Work With / Modify
Check out whether the stylesheet(style.css) is well commented with appropriate section for different layout. Example, if there’s a header image, is that allow you to change it easily?
4. Compatible with Major Browsers
Does the theme work on IE as it is on Firefox? Some theme designers tend to be developed under only a certain browser, which could leave your visitors with a broken or inaccessible site if they are using a browser that can’t understand how that theme was laid out. So before you use the theme, remember to check through the list of theme feature to see whether it works on major browser or not.
5. Upgrades and Fixes
Is the theme you are using frequently updated fixing bugs, browser issues, WordPress update problems etc?
6. Free Help, Support for Plugins You Need
Make sure there a particular place where you can get help for in case you got any problem with downloaded theme, such as a support forum or discussion group?
Speaking of plugins, some themes, especially the free ones may not work with some particular plugins, so do check whether it will work with those you’re willing to implement, example: comment’s preview, sidebar widget, gravatar etc
Ok, now is your call – using a Professional Designed WP Theme for your blog or choose the free ones?
Remember this – theme does bring value to the blog, thus, when make your decision, make sure to look into the above points.
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