Tips in Choosing WordPress Theme for Your Blog

If you’re always using the WordPress platform, picking a new theme will probably be your first priority. Even if you’ve been on the blogging scene for a long time you may still be having a hard time with your theme, spending most of your time on various modifications which ultimately takes away some of your attention from blogging itself.

It’s not hard to see why this small part of blogging requires so much time and attention. After all, picking the right theme can do a great deal for your widgets and codes, not to mention help you with search engine optimizations and thus acquire free traffic every day.

So what do you need to do to find better themes? Here are three ideas that you can try:

Tip #1: Theme Width and Columns

WordPress theme comes in 2 column or 3 column formats. Widths usually vary from 500 to 460 pixels wide. If you have no intention of monetizing your blog, a simple 2 column theme should be reader friendly enough. However, this kind of theme also limits your options when it comes to images and links to other sites. On the plus side, since you have less images of products to worry about, you can focus more of your efforts on the content without leading away your readers from the site.

Of course, if your purpose is money, you may want to pick a 3 column WordPress theme instead, as it can accommodate Google Adsense, Chitika as well as Text Link Ads codes without making a mess of the space available to you. Moreover, 3 column themes offer you more space to expand into. Of course, if you’ve used up all your ad’s space then you should consider removing those ads which don’t perform very well.

Tip #2: Images and Icons on Your WordPress Theme

Even though themes that use various images and icons can look and feel good, they don’t guarantee great traffic. Actually, many top bloggers use simple themes with simple logos. When you reduce the amount of images also means faster loading time on their servers. The importance of server load becomes apparent only if you have tens of thousands of visitors a day, but it’s worth using whenever convenient.

There are blogs that use images intensively in the content areas to add value to a post, but you will notice that the theme itself is rather simple and minimalist. An image-laden theme distracts readers from the content itself.

The most ideal way is to have your theme let you use your own header image for stronger branding purposes and take the place of images and icons with links and text. It would be best not to use them at all unless really needed.

Tip #3: Your WordPress Theme Should be Compatibility with Plugins

Another time-consuming activity is installing plugins that gives improvement in the usefulness of your site. While most of the plugins are free and easy to obtain, it’s not always effortless to install the plugins and insert the codes into your WordPress theme.

You may have a headache to even insert that one line of code to make a plugin work if your theme happens to be a complex one. This is often the case with advanced AJAX-based WordPress themes that contain too many files and heavy coding. Simpler themes that stick to the default WordPress theme are the most preferred.

Always bear in mind that the main purpose of your blog is to deliver timely, relevant content to your readers. Any theme that preserves and improves the reader experience is commendable and any theme that subtracts from the experience shouldn’t be there in the first place.