Member Article

What's a WordPress theme and why do I need to install one?

One of the many advantages of using the WordPress system to build and manage your website is the huge choice of ‘WordPress Themes’ to style your site. The theme forms the basis of your website look and feel, dictating a consistent colour scheme and layout throughout that works for you.

So which from that huge choice do you go for? You only get what you pay for and if you don’t pay anything then you don’t get much do you?

Whilst delivering WordPress training the question of whether to opt for a free WordPress theme or to pay for one of the many excellent commercial ‘paid for’ themes is something that crops often once the decision to use WordPress has been made. This is a strategic decision that should be considered before you go ahead with WordPress along with another option i.e. bespoke design of your website.

Control of Your Website

The strategic decision not only involves what is the right path for the look and feel of your new website but also the question of control of your website. WordPress has enjoyed such huge success on the back of being the system of choice for people who want to have control of their website and the associated costs, that’s fine but with control comes responsibility. This system needs to be maintained on an ongoing basis so that means logging in and carrying out updates on the software itself as well as themes and plugins on a regular basis.

Commercial Themes

In that respect there’s a case for keeping things as straightforward in terms of having a simple theme and as few plugins as possible to do the job. Commercial themes are relatively inexpensive and usually come with good support should you need it, the downside is that quite often they are bloated and with so many features and options that the whole thing gets out of control and you may need to spend as much time learning, setting up and maintaining the theme as you do with learning maintaining and setting up WordPress.

Free Themes

With that in mind I’d like to point you in the direction of two impressive free themes that I’ve come across from Thematosoup, firstly there’s Holi which is a development of the WordPress 2013 theme and then there’s Cazuela. Thematosoup have a simple philosophy; you shouldn’t need to go through a completely new learning exercise to set up your theme and that you should be able to do it using your WordPress admin dashboard.

It’s a back to basics approach that fits in well with current web design trends and the true spirit of WordPress and certainly something that I take into account during WordPress training sessions.

This was posted in Bdaily's Members' News section by Gerry King .