themes

by Jtown

Posted: 12 years ago 14 replies

WEB DESIGN

Hello and thanks for taking the time
I am trying to get some feed back on using themes such as thesis or headway. I have just been using the free ones that can be loaded through WP.

So what are the advantages to using such themes over the ones that WP have?

Thanks

#themes

Istvan Horvath 12 years ago

Nothing for you. Cash for the theme creator

Seriously, the theme in itself will NOT do anything for your blog. The only difference could be how cleanly it is coded ==> making it easier for SEs to crawl it... however, I have seen perfectly coded free themes and over-bloated, messy premium themes. Just because they are good marketers it doesn't make them good coders

Furthermore, if you don't know exactly what your blog (WP site) is supposed to do; how its content should be organized; what additional features you may need, etc. - if you don't know all that, it's completely useless to "look for a theme".

just my $0.02
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RobKonrad 12 years ago

one "advantage" - I found many "professional" (= paid) themes to be visually more exciting and feature-rich than a lot of what's out there.

Plus, many premium themes have a lot of backend options for configuration that most "standard" themes don't have.

I agree with Istvan though - the value of your page is in the content...

Cheers,
Rob
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Hthomas 12 years ago

Most of the times i use free themes after customization :-)

I do not use them as it is
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Jtown 12 years ago

As far as customization to free themes is that all done with coding
Or is there an easier way
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Fernando Veloso 12 years ago

Again, free themes with "natural attraction" for Google... K2 and Atahualpa. Tested for years, plenty of success cases. If you're going the free route, and you're going to a serp's battle, use one of them. You won't regret it.
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Magnet4Marketing 12 years ago

The content is very important but the theme is also very important I think, there is nothing worst than arriving at a poorly coded blog using a prehistoric free theme that takes a gazillion years to load, I'd rather click off than wait for the damn thing to load to read the content no matter how great it was. However there are also some great free themes out there too. Something like Genesis or Thesis even is well worth looking into, especially if you're serious about the value of your content.
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- Jtown 12 years ago
  
  so as far as customizing goes is that done only through code or are there any other tricks
  thank you all for the help
  
  Thanks
  
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LA Grouch 12 years ago

You should try Atahualpa. It is a free theme which offers a lot of customization options and has a very helpful and active forum where you can usually find an answer to any question you might have.

I use this theme exclusively for most of my clients and they are all very happy with the results and ease of use.
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creativerobert 12 years ago

Customizing themes for your blog may have some good results but you need to give more focus on the contents. Contents are the real necessity for the blogs.
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SiteSmarty 12 years ago

Free or premium has nothing to do with the coding. Many of the popular premium developers give away themes that are coded the same as their premium themes. Plus, there are thousands of excellent WP developers who give away all their work which is perfectly coded.

If you're going to shell out money for a theme, Thesis is the best.
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nova37 12 years ago

Some themes have features built in for certain niches. For example, there are several themes which are optimized for affiliate marketing websites.

These are themes which allow you to simply add in variables for each product such as product name, image URL, purchase URL, and description. Then under your posts, visitors can leave comments and testimonials.

But in most cases, basic free themes work well for creating WordPress sites.
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progresst 12 years ago

Paid themes can be a disaster from a coding perspective. I use templatemonster.com sometimes and I've found that some of the authors sacrifice good coding and seo practices for design. Thesis is fantastic, I personally have a few good sites using it and they come up very high in search results.
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stepsG 12 years ago

yes, thesis is good.
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- Jtown 12 years ago
  
  Thank you all for all the help
  
  Thanks
  
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