April 4th, 2010 | 
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If you’re blogging on the Wordpress platform, I’ll bet my entire life savings that the first thing you ever did was try to install a new Wordpress theme. I’ll bet my future earnings that even this day you’re still occasionally changing themes and wasting a lot of time doing minor modifications that when summed up merely distracts you from blogging itself.
Yet, it’s simple to comprehend why themes beg for so much attention. With the correct theme, you can accommodate all the nifty tiny widgets and codes, and might also mean superior search engine rankings and tons of fresh traffic each day.
So what factors do you need to think about to make this whole theme-hunting business easier? Here are five important ones:
1) Theme Width and Columns
Typically, Wordpress themes come in 2-column or 3-column formats, with widths ranging from 500 pixels to 960 pixels wide. If you’re blogging for non-profit purposes, a 2-column theme can look more compact and reader-friendly. Since you have less images of products or links to other sites to display, you can focus exclusively on the content without leading readers away from your site.
On the other hand, if you’re blogging for profit, you might want to think about a 3-column Wordpress theme that will be healthy to accommodate your Google Adsense, Chitika and Text Link Ads codes comfortably without squeezing everything in the content area. 3-column themes grant room for expansion, but in the event that you’ve filled up all acquirable space with ads, then it’s time you removed the non-performers and use only the advertising services that work for that particular blog.
2) Use of Images and Icons
A theme with images and icons can look good, but it rarely increases your web traffic or subscriber base. In fact, most “A-list” bloggers have plain vanilla themes with a simple logo on top. Reducing the amount of images also means faster loading time and less stress on your servers. This vital aspect of server load become apparent only if you have tens of thousands of visitors a day, but it’s worth designing for the future.
A image-laden theme also distracts readers from the content itself. This is the reason why blogs like Engadget and Tech Crunch use images intensively in the content areas to add value to a post, but the theme itself is simple and rather minimalist.
Ideally, a theme should grant you to use your own header image for stronger branding purposes, yet replace images and icons with links and text, or just not use them at all unless totally necessary.
3) Compatibility with Plugins
Another time-sucking activity is installing plugins that improve the functionality of your site. There’s a plugin out there for nearly everything you want to do with your blog, but while most of them are free and easily obtainable, it’s not always simple to install the plugins and insert the codes into your Wordpress theme.
If your theme is too complicated, it might be a headache to even insert that one line of code you need to make a plugin work. This is often the case with advanced AJAX-based Wordpress themes that have too many files and heavy coding. I’ve always preferred a simpler themes that stick to the default Wordpress theme as much as possible, so I can cut back on the learning curve and just get on with my life.
Remember that the purpose of your blog is to deliver timely, relevant content to your readers, Any theme that preserves or improves the reader experience is good, any theme that subtracts from the experience is bad.
4) Search Engine Optimization
A lot can be stated about search engine optimization, but at the end of the day if you have content worth reading eventually you’ll get the rankings you deserve. However, that doesn’t mean that you don’t need SEO; it merely means that as far as optimization is concerned all you really need to do is to make sure:
(a) Your tags are formatted properly, with the study of the post first followed by the study of the blog – some themes can do this automatically without modification to the code or use of a plugin
(b) All your blog content titles use the H1 tag, with the main keywords used instead of non-descriptive text for superior SEO relevance
(b) Your theme has clean source codes, and if doable all formatting is linked to an external CSS file which you can edit independently
5) Plug-And-Play Ease of Use
Can the theme be installed easily on an existing blog without having to move things around? Can the same theme be used and customized easily on your other blogs? These are some additional things you might want to think about when theme-shopping, especially if each minute of downtime on your blog might mean lost revenue.
While it’s hard to make comparisons due to the sheer amount of free and paid themes out there, it’s still a good intent to have a test blog site. Test any theme you plan on using, and make sure your test blog is also fitted with all the plugins and miscellaneous widgets used on your real blog. The last thing you want is for your readers begin seeing weird error messages on your blog.
At the end of the day, a theme is just a theme. Instead of spending your time installing them, it might be wiser to outsource the task and focus more on your readers. Alternatively, you might also want to think about buying “plug-and-play” themes for a reasonable price. Dennis De’ Bernardy of ProWordpress.com has probably one of the ideal themes around, but if you’re short on cash there are certainly cheaper alternatives.
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