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5 Factors of Effective Wordpress Themes

If you are blogging on the Wordpress platform, I bet my entire life savings that the first thing you ever did was try to install a new Wordpress theme. I bet my future earnings that even today, you are still at changing themes and wasting a lot of time doing minor modifications that when summed up merely distracts you from blogging itself.

However, it is easy to understand why the subject asks for so much attention. With the exact theme, you can host all the nifty little widgets and codes, and can also mean a better search engine rankings and tons of fresh traffic every day.

So what are the factors you should consider to make this whole subject matter hunting easier? Here are five most important:

1) Theme Width and Columns

In general, Wordpress themes are 2 to 3-column or column formats, with widths from 500 pixels by 960 pixels wide. If you're blogging for non-profit, 2-column theme may look more compact and easy to read. Since you have less images of products or links to other sites to display, you can focus exclusively on the content without readers leading away from your site.

On the other hand, if you're blogging for profit, you can opt for un 3 column Wordpress theme that will be able to meet your Google Adsense, Chitika and Text Link Ads codes comfortably without shaking everything in the content area. themes 3-column allows room for expansion, but in case you have filled all available space for ads, then it's time you removed non-performers and use only the advertising services that work for this 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 issues with a simple logo on top. Reduce the amount of images is also the fastest loading time and less stress on your servers. This key aspect of the server load is apparent that if you have tens of thousands of visitors per day, but it's worth designing for the future.

A colorful theme also distracts readers from the content itself. That's why blogs like Engadget and Tech Crunch use images extensively in the areas of content to add value to a position, but the theme itself is simple and rather minimalist.

Ideally a theme should allow you to use your own image header for the purpose strong brand, but replace the images and icons with links and text, or simply not use them at all unless absolutely necessary.

3) Compatibility with Plugins

Another activity time suck is the installation of plugins that enhance the functionality of your site. It is a plugin out there for almost everything you want to do with your blog, but while most of them are free and easily accessible, it is not always easy to install plugins and insert codes into your Wordpress theme.

If your theme is too complicated, it can be a headache to even insert a line of code you need to run a plugin. This is often the case with advanced AJAX-based Wordpress themes that have too many files and heavy coding. I always preferred a simple themes that stick to the default theme of Wordpress as much as possible so that I can reduce the learning curve and just with my life.

Remember that the purpose of your blog is to provide timely, relevant content to your readers, any theme maintains or improves the reader experience is good, a theme that subtracts from the experience is bad.

4) Engine Optimization Search

Much can be said about the search engine optimization, but at the end of the day if you have content worth read eventually you'll get the ranking you deserve. However, this does not mean you do not need SEO, it simply means that insofar optimization is concerned about all you really need to do is to ensure:

(A) Your keywords are formatted properly, with the name of the first position, followed by the name of the blog – some themes can do this automatically, without changing the code or use a plugin

(B) All the titles of your blog content using the H1 tag, with the main keywords used instead of non-descriptive text for better SEO relevance

(B) The theme of your source code is clean, and if possible the formatting is linked to an external CSS file that you can change independently

5) the simplicity of Plug and Play use

Then the theme be installed easily on an existing blog without having to move items? Perhaps the same theme used and customized easily on your other blogs? These are extra things you might want to consider when theme-shopping, especially if every minute of downtime on your blog can mean loss of income.

Although it is difficult to make comparisons because of the enormous amount of free and paid themes out there, it's always a good idea to have a test blog site. Test the theme you plan to use, and be sure to test your blog is also equipped with all the plugins and widgets used on various real blog. The last thing you want is for your readers start to see strange error messages on your blog.

In the end of the day, a theme is just a theme. Instead of spending your time to install them, it may be wiser to entrust the task and focus more your readers. Alternatively, you can also consider buying "plug-and-play" themes for a reasonable price. From Dennis' Bernardy of ProWordpress.com probably one of the best themes around, but if you're short of cash there are certainly cheaper solutions.

About the Author

Gobala Krishnan is the guy newbies come to for a crash course on blogging for fun or profit. He’s also the creator of the
Instant Wordpress Themes
package where you can get beautiful themes for $1 each.