Guide to Choosing Best Wordpress Themes

The number of Wordpress themes have sprung up tremendously over the past few years. While the end users are the biggest beneficiary of the trend, it is getting harder to choose the right Wordpress themes that are of good quality.

When users download a theme, more often than not, they have no idea what is in store for them. Most of the time, the only judgment they make in choosing a WP theme is by the sheer appearance of it. Whether the theme performs or not will only come to light beyond the installation.

It would save you a lot of time and effort if you know what to look for in a best Wordpress theme. Do yourself a favor by considering these 3 things when choosing your best themes: theme layout and design, theme coding, designers' skill and reputation.

Wordpress Theme Layout
First thing first, ask yourself. What is the purpose of your site? Is it going to be a personal blog with a standard 2-column right sidebar layout? Or you want a magazine or a portfolio style site? Due to the abundance of quality Wordpress themes available in the market, you should have no problem finding one to suit your site.

Wordpress Theme Application
Now, you need to think of what features you need in the layout. Do you need a built-in featured content section, twitter apps, flickr gallery etc.? List out all the must-have and can-have built-in feature. Then bear those in mind when you search from among thousands of Wordpress themes out there.

Wordpress Theme Design and Color
When you have decided on your blog's layout and features, the next thing is to decide the graphical and color element of the WP themes. Do you prefer image-rich design or simple minimalist type? This is quite personal so choose according to your taste.

Majority of you reading this guide are not coders so I am going to describe in a way most of you can understand. Here I strongly recommend you to take a look at ThemeGrade.com which has done a very good job in reviewing the coding part of a Wordpress theme in comprehensive ways.

Explaining the methods used by this site in the testing of a theme gives you a clear idea as to what to look out for in the theme coding. Simply put, this is what ThemeGrade has done. First, the admin section in the Wordpress demo account has been configured to include several test items. When a theme is installed in the system, the preview page of the WP theme will uncover the coding issues, if any. If no abnormalities are found in the tested item, it will pass the particular test. A test item will be marked as fail If abnormalities are found.

I am not going to go into details of the each tests because ThemeGrade explains it well at their test criteria page but there are a few important tests deserve to be mentioned here.

Browser Compatibility - Is the theme compatible with major browsers?
Internet users browse on various browsers. More than 95% of them are using one of the 6 major browsers, i.e., Firefox, IE7, IE8, Safari, Chrome, Opera. The most important browser by far is Firefox. Always check the Wordpress theme and see if it works with Firefox before checking on other browsers.

Code Compliant - Does the theme pass W3C tests?
A theme that is code compliant tend to rank higher on search engines. Also, a code compliant WP theme will tend to work well with different devices such as iPhone and PDAs.

SE Optimized - Is the theme optimized for Search Engines?
SEO plugins are available to help your blog's ranking. However, some of the things essential in search ranking have to be built in the coding structure. For example, how early the post content appear in the source code is important for SEO and the plugins have no control over it. position many of the features are not applicable if the theme is not optimized. If you are using an SE optimized theme, your blog will rank higher on search engines than using other non-optimized one.

Whether you are searching for free or paid Wordpress themes, they are made available to everyone. Unless the themes are just released, there must be someone already have experience with the WP themes. Here I'll show you how to decide if the designers are good and where to find users' comment of both the designers and their work.

If you do not have the luxury of time (most of us don't) to do a detail study on every theme, review the theme designer instead.

A good designer will take their themes seriously and there are a few ways to tell if he/she has what it takes to become one.

Theme Support

This is one of the most important factors to tell if a theme is well developed. Go to the designers' site and see if they offer theme support. If yes, don't stop there but study how exactly they handle the support.

Most premium Wordpress themes are generally well-coded and come with theme support. For free themes, you will have to dig further.

Ask yourself two questions when you evaluate the support of free theme designers.

1. What type of support does the theme designer provide?
There are normally 3 types of support provided by the theme designers; i.e., email, comment and forum. Be skeptical if the theme designers only offer email support as you can't trace how they handle it. For the other two types of support, read what questions users have asked and see how their issues have been addressed. There is no better way to find out the skill of the Wordpress theme designers than look at how they react with the users.

If you know someone is always there to help, the quality of the WP theme cannot be too low.

2. How soon is the response time?
WP Theme designers are always busy but if they are willing to spare some time to address your issues well without much delay, they are serious about their themes and you. If you find such a designer, their Wordpress theme would be among the top 10% in the market.

Theme and Designers' Reputation

By looking at the number of sites featuring a Wordpress theme will give you an idea how popular the theme is. To find out, simply do a search in Google using this keyword:

[Theme Name] Wordpress theme

Replace [Theme Name] with the theme you want to search.

Knowing the theme popularity doesn't mean the theme is of high quality. You need to do more.

1. Visit the top 30 sites in the search result pages. If you see a couple of big sites listing the WP theme, chances are the theme is not too bad.

2. Do a more specific search. Add "review" to the search term. In the result pages, visit the sites in which review has been performed to the theme. If the site does a good job in reviewing Wordpress themes like what ThemeGrade.com is doing, bookmark the site for future reference. It will save you tremendous amount of time once you find a few trusted sources.

Templatelite - Editor's Choice of the Best
Free Wordpress Template Provider

Elegantthemes - Editor's Choice of the Best
Premium Wordpress Theme Provider