Congratulations! You’ve set up your blog/website and are ready to start writing and posting images to attract readers. However, you’ve come across one little problem. How do you pick a theme that looks great, works well, and offers plenty of customization?
It can be tricky figuring out which theme to install on your blog with so many different designs to choose from,
As a result, I’ve put together some tips on choosing a theme that looks fabulous and provides functionality based on your website goals.
Theme Elements to Consider For Your Website
- Overall design
- Navigation
- Image layout
- Font size and design
- Theme customization
1. Overall Design
A theme’s design is how your website looks after you’ve added sufficient text, content, and images to your blog.
Well-designed themes offer demo templates to see how they look once you’ve added content.
The demo should allow you to click different images, links, navigational elements, and features.
That way, you can see what users will see when interacting with your website.
Also, consider what content your blog will focus on and choose a theme appropriate for that content style.
For example, suppose you’re writing contextual news-focused content with many images (such as a tech, news, or auto enthusiast blog).
In that case, choose a magazine or news style theme that lays allows visitors to browse all of your recent articles on the front page.
The theme should offer many clickable links and images to related articles on specific content categories.
Alternatively, suppose you’re creating a photo-rich website like a photography blog or graphic portfolio site.
These blogs focus primarily on high-quality images with very little text.
In that case, pick a photography theme to lay out appealing and attractive pictures prominently.
Finally, look for a real estate theme or food blog template if your website focuses on those topics.
That way, it provides the visual style and functional features specific to those types of content.
The first thing to consider when picking a blog theme is making sure it works well with your content type.
Popular Website/Blog Theme Categories Include:
- Blog style
- Books
- Business
- eCommerce
- Enterprise
- Forums
- Lifestyle
- Magazine Style
- Minimalist
- News
- Photography
- Real Estate
And numerous other template categories.
It helps you narrow your choice of themes to the ones that work best with your specific content.
2. Navigation
Navigation is closely related to the blog’s overall theme/template.
It provides visual and functional features that allow visitors to navigate your website and find important information/topics.
Your navigation includes several areas of a website.
However, I’ll focus on this section’s top navigation and homepage.
The top navigation allows users to search specific categories/topics, read the about page, make purchases and view their shopping carts.
It is the most common and well-known navigation for visitors and blog owners.
However, visitors also navigate a website through its homepage or specially crafted category pages by clicking on-page articles and topics.
Any link, photo, video, or clickable element that allows a visitor to click from one page to another is a form of navigation.
Therefore, it’s essential to pick a theme with navigation that’s easy to use, customizable and guides the reader to valuable content.
Finally, the website’s footer is considered a form of aviation.
It’s where users get additional information, read terms and conditions, contact the website owner, or access other essential pages.
What to Consider in A Themes Navigation
You’ll want to carefully consider how you want readers to navigate your website when determining a theme.
Should users access your website primarily through images or infographics?
If so, how large should the photos be?
Should they navigate your website through links within your content?
If so, should links be bold or underlined?
What about navigating the website through the sidebar navigation or the navigation menu on the top of your website?
Picking a theme that guides how readers move around your blog helps them focus on specific articles, topics, images, or calls to action.
For example, the most helpful navigation for a photography blog clarifies that users can click specific images and links for more information.
Readers of a news site should know they can click the article’s title or read more links to learn about exciting topics.
Alternatively, bright buttons and bold links help users identify products or services on an e-commerce website.
While a simple navigation menu makes sense for most bloggers, many overlook this critical aspect.
As your website grows, a poor navigation system makes it harder to link to meaningful articles or topics.
It also makes your site look overly bloated or confusing.
Avoid this by choosing an appropriate theme and keeping navigation, buttons, links, and images in mind.
That way, your content remains easily accessible clean, and uncluttered as you grow your blog.
Too many links, images, or buttons create confusion and cause visitors to leave your blog.
They won’t know where to begin or figure out what content is relevant and vital.
3. Image layout
Image layout is essentially a combination of the blog’s visual design and navigation.
How a website theme organizes and displays images significantly impacts how professional the theme looks.
Therefore, the more image-heavy the blog is, the more critical that images are aesthetically pleasing and functional.
Some themes provide various image sizes, layouts, and montages based on the image’s location.
These themes allow you to modify the images depending on the page or device readers use to access your blog.
In short, you have more control over your website’s appearance on desktop, tablet, or mobile.
Please look at the theme on multiple devices and click-through demo pages to see how they represent the images.
It ensures the images and navigation looks great on different devices before purchasing the theme.
With more users accessing websites via mobile instead of desktop, a high-quality mobile-friendly theme is essential.
Some theme templates also display images differently on the homepage, blog page, category page, portfolio page, landing page, and product page.
They may use diverse layout sizes or formatting for each page type in this case.
Before purchasing the theme, make sure you click through these elements to ensure everything looks excellent.
Images must remain consistent, correctly sized, and fluent with each page and page type.
That way, your blog maintains a professional appearance regardless of what page your reader is on.
Eventfully you may decide to expand your blog and take advantage of other features.
If so, checking how images look is an excellent way to future-proof your blog as it grows.
Finally, WordPress makes it easy to change themes if you don’t look the way your blog looks.
So it’s not the end of the world if the theme doesn’t mesh well with your content!
4. Fonts
Although numerous fonts are available, choose an attractive, professional, and easy-to-read font.
It must be legible and work well on various screens, including desktops, tablets, and mobile phones.
A website’s font is one of the most important things to consider when choosing a theme.
Ultimately, it determines how simple it is for visitors to read your content.
A theme font text that’s too small or stylized makes sentences challenging to read.
As a result, it significantly reduces how long visitors stay on your site.
Some themes offer the ability to select from multiple font styles and sizes.
It’s beneficial for you to go through the various options and pick a clean, easy-to-read font.
Here are several examples of easy-to-read fonts commonly used by blogs:
- Roboto
- Open Sans
- Raleway
- PT Serif; Georgia
- Customization and flexibility
Also, look at popular fonts that work well with your website’s title, headings, body/content, and links.
You can always contact the designer/seller and ask how to change the font if a theme doesn’t offer a style you like.
Lastly, even if you find a clean and professional font, ensure the text is large enough to be easily read on various devices.
It is essential on mobile because it’s the preferred way to browse online content for millions of people.
5. Theme Customization
Theme customization determines how flexible it is to change your website’s look and feel to run the way you want.
Customization varies greatly depending on how the designer constructed the theme.
Some themes allow you to change various elements of their appearance and functionality.
It includes navigation, image layout, font size and style, widgets/plug-ins, and various templates.
Other developers have a particular vision for their theme’s look and feel.
These themes may not offer much flexibility to alter their appearance.
However, the theme-specific design could optimize appearance and navigation to maximize visitor retention.
Theme customization could be simple such as letting you decide where to put the sidebar, or it could be highly complex.
A complex theme could allow you to adjust every element, including colors, fonts, page layout, navigation, special plug-ins, and more!
Overall, pick a good base design with tools that let you determine your blog’s final appearance.
And remember, with WordPress, you can easily change themes if you don’t like the look of a particular design.
Themes that offer good customization allow you to distinguish your blogs from other websites, especially blogs in the same niche.
That said, pick a theme with light customization if you want to start producing content quickly and aren’t interested in customization.
You’ll be able to switch to a more dynamic theme once you’ve established your blog and want to improve its overall functionality.
Why Premium Themes Help Your Blog
There are a lot of great free themes available on the market.
However, I recommend premium themes from established brands that regularly update their blog themes, designs, and functionality.
It allows you to optimize your theme as your website grows and becomes more robust.
Its’ also easier to modify the look and functionality of your blog.
Some premium themes offer customer support and new features compatible with WordPress’s latest versions.
Finally, high-quality premium themes offer a lot of customization.
That way, you” can tweak many of the theme’s aspects.
Ultimately, you’ll have a blog that looks and functions how you want instead of being stuck with a default design.