How To Evaluate A WordPress Theme For Your Blog

August 4, 2009 By Leave a Comment

(Reading time: 12 – 20 minutes)

Choosing a WordPress theme can a tough chore. Especially if you’re a beginner.

What criteria should you use? How it looks? Or how it works?

For example, consider all the following choices… Sidebar right or left? Serif versus san serif fonts? Fat footer or links in sidebar? Header image or text header?

Here’s your first and hardest decision: How many columns? Two column vs three column? Or a single column…. or maybe 4 columns? I personally like 3 column… but it seems to me all the “top bloggers” I’m currently reading use 2 column… which is a hint to me to master 2 column theme design. There is a big advantage to using fewer columns: the less material on your web page, the less that can go wrong. (Less is more!) Later, when I get rich… perhaps I’ll experiment with 3 columns again.

Probably the hardest thing about choosing a WordPress theme isn’t choosing the theme… but knowing exactly what you want to communicate, and who you want to communicate to. That is, once you have a clear idea of who your audience is, choosing a theme should be much simpler.

Before we really dive in, trundle off to eHow and read Sabah’s article “How to Choose a WordPress Theme for Your Blog.” Sabah does an excellent job of listing out the “what” you need to do, especially for beginners. When you get back we’re going to discuss the “why” and the “how” in depth.

Hi. You’re back. Did you print Sabah’s article? I did. Or rather I saved it as PDF format for future reference.

Paid themes versus free themes?

It turns out that once you have made one theme, it’s not very difficult to make a “different” theme by changing the images and adjusting the CSS a little bit. The result: theme explosion!

So there’s a LOT of free WordPress themes floating around the web. And that’s a good thing in general. What’s not so good is finding a free theme that will stand the test of being upgraded over time. As WordPress changes, themes need to keep up, or be left behind. If you choose a free theme, the onus is on you to keep it maintained. This includes keeping track of security issues as they arise as well. Most likely, you will end up paying someone to keep your theme up to date over time, or spend that time doing it yourself.

However, the situation with free themes that are hosted at wordpress.org may be evolving. Themes that are under active maintenance or development may have some of the preceding disadvantages rectified.

In contrast, when you pay for a theme, the theme developer(s) keeps track of the necessary changes induced by WordPress development (and hopefully security issues as well). When it’s time to upgrade, you simply install the upgraded version of the theme and uninstall the obsolete version. Simple, easy, inexpensive.

Long time readers know I use and promote the Thesis theme here on Website In A Weekend. Along with Thesis, here’s a few other commercially available themes for WordPress:

  1. Artisteer
  2. Woo Themes
  3. Hybrid

Note: I do not have any affiliation with any of the theme foundries above. However, each are highly recommended by other bloggers, and I may try them out in the future.

If you’re in this blogging game for the long run, I recommend you invest in an appropriate commercially available theme, where the developer is making his or her living from sales and support of the theme. That’s about the best guarantee you’re going get that the theme will stay current and relevant with WordPress development.

Does your theme need to be unique?

Or can your theme look like everyone else’s?

Answering that question is difficult. The truth is…

…it depends.

The short answer is this: if you are focused purely on content, the uniqueness of your theme probably isn’t all that important. People interested in content probably won’t even notice. In fact, the more obvious “design” you have, the more you’re going to annoy content-focused readers. If your blog is part of your personal branding, or your business model depends on reader involvement for marketing, you’re going to have to do considerably more work and your theme will be unique when you’re done.

For my blog There Is NO Box, I resisted using anything other than the Kubrick (default) theme for years, because I was more interested in the process of writing and recording for myself than for anyone else. That is, my focus was purely on content. I’ve since switched to using Thesis theme, which I like very much, in part because I am selling advertising… which depends on visual appeal.

The best example of this is academic journals. They all pretty much look the same, and certainly all the articles in each journal are formatted identically; only the content of the articles matters. If this is your situation, Thesis certainly provides very nice styling in it’s default configuration, but so does Kubrick (WordPress’ default theme) and the Journalist theme.

Getting reader involvement requires both inspiration and quantitative testing of your design. Very subtle changes can be tested to influence your results in very significant ways. Unfortunately, there is no general principle. No one can tell you: “Set up your website exactly like this and get triple profits.” Such advice might work, it might not. The important thing is having a theme that allows you to make relatively small changes very quickly. So far as I know, there isn’t any way yet to monitor such changes within WordPress. (Opportunity knocks.) Note that I mentioned above that when you’re done, you will have a unique theme, which is slightly misleading, because you aren’t ever finished. You will need to maintain your theme, and that includes keeping up with your audience as they evolve.

Professional appearance

Here’s the lowdown: If professional appearance is important to you right out of the box, either purchase a professionally designed theme, or hire someone to create a custom theme for reflecting you, your material and your audience.

The style of your theme needs to match your content. If you’re a professional of any stripe, your theme needs to reflect that. If you sell stuff on the internet, that should be obvious too. If your content is stuffy articles on computational mechanics, your theme design should tell the reader to “fasten seat belts, rough ride ahead” while at the same time making it as easy as possible for the reader.

In short, congruence is the key.

Consider Website In A Weekend. The focus here is currently on advanced do-it-yourself WordPress knowledge. Is this technical content congruent with the appearance of the website? In my opinion, not yet. The content implies “WordPress expert” but the design screams “WordPress amateur.” This is partly by plan: I’m better at generating content in words than I am at generating content in visual design. So the words get done first. Once the WordPress 101 articles of pillar content are complete, another round of theme design and CSS tweaking will take Website In A Weekend site a step forward.

Functional considerations

No matter what your theme looks like, you should answer the following questions to your own satisfaction: 1. does the theme have SEO-optimized structure, 2. whether or not you are going to advertise on your blog, and 3. whether the HTML and CSS source code is valid. Let’s go into more detail about these questions are important.

Does the theme have correct SEO structure?

SEO capabilities are important, you want a theme that’s search engine friendly out of the box. This isn’t that hard for the theme author, given how much information is now publicly available on SEO criteria, but it would be a nightmare for you to hack it into a theme. The easiest way I know of to test SEO friendliness is to temporarily install the theme, then run a few pages, including the front page, a single post, and single page through an SEO testing service. There are many on the web, a subject for a future article.

Are you going to advertise?

If you’re going to serve up advertisements, having some support in theme is extremely helpful. I can’t do any better than this explanation from Daniel Scocco of Daily Blog Tips (link below):

Will the theme fit your monetization plans? If you have any thoughts or intentions of monetizing your blog you should take this into consideration when choosing a theme. If you are going to be placing AdSense ads, text link ads, or banner ads on your blog, the theme should have a good place for them. Trying to stuff them into a theme that isn’t intended to allow room for ads will create a very cluttered look that will distract and annoy readers.

Does the theme HTML and CSS validate correctly?

As Daniel Scocco at Daily Blog Tips notes: “About 99% of bloggers probably don’t care about valid code, but some do. Valid code will give you the best chance of giving your visitors a problem-free visit.” Actually, the only people that care about valid code are people that write code validators, and developers. For the rest of us, valid code should means 1. faster web page loading times, and 2. correct page display across multiple platforms, ranging from PCs to mobile devices.

Is the theme up to date?

This should not be an issue with premium or paid themes: the theme’s author or authors should be keeping track of WordPress development on a daily basis, and ensuring their commercial theme uses the most efficient and most secure techniques for theme development.

For free themes, make sure they work – correctly – with the latest version of WordPress. For example, if you find a theme that doesn’t support revisions, or tags, or widgets, or taxonomies, don’t use it! These capabilities will become much more important to you in the future, as your ability to create content (e.g., write blog posts) improves.

If the theme relies on table layout, inline styles, or other deprecated techniques, don’t use it. The web has evolved away from such techniques, and is continuing to evolve further away from them. You can check for these techniques by examining the source code of any web page delivered by the theme. All modern web browsers have a menu item for selecting a page source view. Use CTRL-U shortcut key in Firefox or Chrome to see the page source.

Check with an HTML validator, for example at W3C, to ensure that both the theme and the CSS are valid. As it turns out, a lot of themes don’t validate 100%. This may or may not be a problem. If the validation uncovers, say, 57 errors which are all empty alt attributes, this isn’t really a theme problem. If the errors are unclosed list elements, that’s a much more profound issue, a deal breaker really.

“Future proofing” your blog

“Future proofing” is the notion that your choices today account for anticipated requirements in the future. For any theme you choose, you need to consider it’s long term potential for two cases:

  1. Will the theme’s technical structure be sufficient to carry it through the next several WordPress releases? You’re looking for ease of maintenance, and for ability to support new WordPress features that are under active development such as taxonomies.
  2. Does the theme’s design support your future vision for your blog or website? Suppose you are not displaying advertisements right now, but you plan to in the future. Then choose your theme with advertisement requirements in mind.

Future proofing is more of mindset than something that can be boiled down into a checklist. Just keep in mind that you’re choosing a theme not only for “right now,” but for “next year” as well, especially if you’re seriously considering purchasing a commercially supported theme.

Is your WordPress theme secure?

WordPress security has gotten immensely better over the last 3 years. In fact, 3 years ago I made a decision to build out a website using Drupal in part due to Drupal’s better security at that time. Now, WordPress security is really good, provided you stick with themes and plugins distributed as part of a official WordPress release. Once you start extending WordPress with other plugins and themes, you need to be a little more aware of security. Here’s some important considerations:

The two main things you want to look for in a theme are 1. so-called sponsored links, and 2. hidden links or hidden code in base64 encoded blocks.

Sponsored links may or may not be malicious. For example, a large number of themes display a link back to the theme home page in the footer of the theme. I use an optional link on my hRecipe plugin to check where it’s being used, very helpful for me for quality control and helping users solve display problems. Other sponsored links aren’t so benign, and may point your blog to websites that you don’t want to be associated with. Don Lawson at Affiliate Watcher has an interesting article on sponsored links “My View On Sponsored Links In WordPress Themes.” For a slightly different point of view, check out Buzzdroid’s WordPress: Beware The Sponsored Link Theme – Do You Know Where Your PageRank Is Going?

Hidden or encrypted links are almost, but not always malicious. If they weren’t, they wouldn’t be encrypted. I do know of one theme that uses an encrypted footer to maintain a sponsored link back to the theme’s home page. This is annoying but not insurmountable. Simply decrypt and modify – or just delete – the offending code.

But the usual case is that encrypted code is malicious. Checking for encrypted code in your WordPress theme got a whole lot easier recently, with the release of two very useful plugins, Exploit Scanner and Theme Authenticity Checker:

Read the home pages for each of these plugins carefully to ensure you understand what they are looking for on your blog.

Note: both Theme Authenticity Scanner and Exploit Scanner should be installed fresh before each use, preferably checking to ensure the MDA5 encryption keys match. After using the plugins, delete every trace of them from your WordPress installation. Doing this will ensure these plugins never get hacked as a result of some other security leak. If they were hacked, their results would be useless.

Here’s another 3 Tips to Avoid Dangerous Themes and Plugins, courtesy of DK at Security Evangelists BlogSecurity website. I have not used their scanner plugin and web interface yet. It looks interesting. Someone check it out and leave a comment telling about us about how it worked for you.

WordPress security in general is worthy of it’s own lengthy article. These suggestions will get you started, and remember, security on the internet, just as in real life, is not “a problem.” Security is a process, mastered step-by-step.

Related links for choosing WordPress theme

Each of these links focuses on slightly different aspects of choosing a theme. For example, one site emphasizes potential monetization, while another recommends ensuring the technical construction of the theme is good. Yet another accentuates the importance of “look and feel.” I found these articles very useful as references.

In closing, if you choose the wrong theme, it’s not that big of problem. Just choose another!

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