5 Things to Look for While Selecting a Blog Theme
One of the best features of hosted Wordpress blogs are the availability of 1000s of themes available for free download and customize. Blog design is one of the important things for the blog and you need to chose your theme properly. Here are 5 things to look for while selecting a good theme for your blog.
- Cross Browser Compatibility: First thing is to check if the theme is compatible with popular browsers like IE 6, 7, Firefox and Opera. You can check compatibility with other browsers using Browsershots.
- Easy to Modify: Its common that we modify the theme to suit our requirements and functions, so its important that the theme can be modified easily and there are proper commenting in the code to identify each functions.
- Widget Support: Nowadays most of the themes comes with in-build widget support, but its better that we ensure that the theme is widget ready and already has few common widgets added to it.
- Check the popularity: Checking the popularity can be done by checking the number of downloads of the theme. This is one way good in the sense that only if the theme is good people will download, but in other way bad that you will get a unique theme.
- Validate the Code: Make sure that the code is valid, you can check the HTML and the CSS code using online validations.
If you would like to add any more points to this, please share it in comments.
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Sep 12th, 2007 at 4:07 pm
Nice points you’ve covered.
I always keep an eye on the number of previous downloads of the theme
Validation is something I don’t worry about, but I think I should make sure to check that as well.
Sep 12th, 2007 at 4:14 pm
What about ‘Should look good’?
Sep 12th, 2007 at 4:24 pm
I would like to add some SEO issues. Not all themes do this nicely and it can be some massive effort to change the theme to fit your SEO needs.
Sep 12th, 2007 at 4:42 pm
@Shankar,
Validation is one thing I’m also looking into, problem is when we change the theme settings, lot of validation error happens.
@Binny,
Good look is obvious thing, right?
@Marco Richter,
Thanks for the Add, you are right, some themes require lot of change for SEO needs.
Sep 12th, 2007 at 4:47 pm
Good Tips Nirmal!
Sep 12th, 2007 at 5:17 pm
Nice Tips.
am looking for some clean theme for My blog Technobuzz. But
Sep 12th, 2007 at 7:29 pm
@Technobuzz,
You didnt complete the sentence!
Sep 12th, 2007 at 7:49 pm
Good point . I also keep an eye on the color scheme as well as the loading time .
Sep 12th, 2007 at 9:10 pm
Good points, as madhur said it should load faster, thats why i removed K2 in my blog.
Sep 12th, 2007 at 10:27 pm
@Madhur and Ram,
I agree with you on loading time,its also an important factor.
Sep 12th, 2007 at 10:50 pm
[...] Via Life Rocks 2.0 [...]
Sep 12th, 2007 at 11:34 pm
@Nirmal
Do you know any simplistic and professional seo optimized theme which uses H1 for title tags i am unable to find it…
These things i am looking for selecting a blog theme
Sep 13th, 2007 at 12:40 am
Solid tips buddy. With blog redesign season in full swing, a lot of people are looking for new themes. Great post.
Sep 13th, 2007 at 2:06 am
@shashank ,may be Nirmal can post “5 themes I like to choose for your blog ”
Sep 13th, 2007 at 5:09 am
So Nirmal, could you suggest me a theme? I would like to change a theme in this month.
Sep 13th, 2007 at 8:28 am
During my early days in Blogging, I chose K2 as my theme as it had many live features (live search, live archive, comments can be made without reloading page, etc)…but later I started disabling these features to speed up my site and also these live features were killing my pageviews.
And then these features became useless to me and were just slowing down my site even though I was not using it, that is when I started customizing it and K2 ended up as TripleK2 and in many forms…The new design you see on my blog can not be called K2 anymore as I removed a lot of code from it which was not needed…like the code that is needed to use a plugin and added more simple code.
What I wanted to say is…K2 has a lot of stuff in it of which peope will use only some and it will just slow down your site…so it might be better to pick some other theme…
I hope my comment was not too long
Sep 13th, 2007 at 10:33 am
great post nirmal, i think the widget support is huge
Sep 13th, 2007 at 11:44 am
What actually affects the loading time of a theme?
Sep 13th, 2007 at 11:48 am
@Rahul
that would be great 
Sep 13th, 2007 at 2:37 pm
Finally I got the new theme with widget support
Sep 13th, 2007 at 11:54 pm
Excellent advice. I wish I found this two month ago. Luckily, the theme I selected works very well for me.
Sep 14th, 2007 at 7:41 am
Nice points, thanks
Sep 14th, 2007 at 9:01 am
I’ll also check if the theme is well optimized for Adsense and SEO. Anyways great tips, Nirmal.
Sep 14th, 2007 at 9:55 am
@Shashank,
ITs difficult to search for a theme with SEO and H1 tags from the huge database of themes.
@BrownBaron,
Glad that you liked the article.
@Rahul,
I think there are lots of posts like the one mentioned by you, thats why I’ve not posted that.
@Ken Xu,
I’ll try to figure out a good theme for you.
Sep 14th, 2007 at 10:01 am
@John,
Glad to see you here. You are absolutely right, K2 has lot of features, but slow to load. Its best to get a theme which loads fast.
@Clara,
There are lot of things which contribute to load time, like features on the blog, widgets, the call for all the functions, images used in the theme etc.
@Technobuzz,
Glad that you got a theme!
@Harris,
Thanks for the add. SEO and Adsense is also one of the important things to look for.
Sep 14th, 2007 at 11:43 pm
thanks for reminding for browser shots, my site was looking a bit crappy in IE 6
Sep 18th, 2007 at 4:16 pm
i’ve listed out 50 good themes if you are looking for some good ones. check it out here -> 50 more wordpress themes
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