WordPress Training Perth - Selecting and Installing a WordPress Theme

Free vs. Paid WordPress Themes

If budget is an issue, the good news is that if you hunt around for a while, you can find free themes that are simply awesome and will do a great job for you. In fact, some of the best themes I’ve come across over the last year for my own clients have had both a free and paid version on offer, where the free version was excellent, and did the job required without having to go for the paid option.

However, these high quality free themes can often be as difficult to find as the proverbial ‘needle in a haystack’, with the vast majority of the offerings available being either of very poor quality or severely restricted in some way as to force you to buy the paid version. This is a commonly accepted marketing practice of course, but that doesn’t make it any less annoying.

So I believe that it is far better to approach the task of finding a good theme for your WordPress website having committed to purchasing a paid version. I favour this approach because the theme you choose will have a very significant influence on the conversion potential of your website when visitors land there, and hence, this is an aspect of your site’s functionality that you should not cheap out on.

Make sure that it is Fully Responsive in design

In my opinion, this is the most important criteria to consider, as it is absolutely vital that your WordPress business website is easy to read, navigate and interact with on mobile devices, especially smartphones such as the Samsung Note and Apple iPhone.

As up to 87% of your website's visitors will use a mobile phone to find you during normal business hours, and will have up to six times the intent to buy when using a mobile device to check out your goods and services, to use a website theme that does not render perfectly on all devices is nothing short of madness.

Therefore, when selecting a theme for your WordPress business website, make absolutely sure that it is identified as being 'fully responsive' by the vendor. If no such statement is clearly visible in the theme's sales copy, then do not purchase it, just move onto the next theme and check that one out instead. I can't stress the importance of this enough!

Go for simplicity

Never forget that purpose of your WordPress business website is to take its visitors successfully from your landing pages through to the conversion devices you have created for them. As such, the design of your site should revolve fully around the achievement of this result, with all features and functionality selected in the context of this conversion outcome.

Therefore, when selecting a WordPress theme, avoid those that seduce you with their vast array of boxes, sliding panels, interactive devices, complex tabbed layouts, dazzling image galleries and so on, as you will find that although inviting, most do not support you website's business goals in any direct way.

Further, a website that is bogged down many of these memory-intensive devices will not only slow down the load times of your landing pages, they will also fail to be compatible across all browsers and devices. Both of these issues will work against your conversion efforts significantly.

I strongly suggest that you avoid intricate, flashy and function-heavy designs in favour of simple designs that load fast, are simple to modify to your custom requirements and are compatible with most browsers.

Go for a highly-flexible layout

A good WordPress theme should allow you to set up your business website exactly the way that you need it to be setup to support your 'landing page to conversion' funnel. As such, creating new sections and functions should be quick and easy to achieve as required.

In particular, choose a theme that allows you to create and position custom Widgets anywhere you want them to appear. This is because custom Widgets will be one of the primary ways in which you add purpose-specific conversion funnel enablers to your site without having to be familiar with WordPress coding languages.

In particular, you will want to be able to easily add custom sidebars, social media sharing buttons, opt-in forms and custom advertisements wherever you happen to need them to be.

The WordPress theme you select for your business website should also allow you to 'mix and match' the layout of your business website at the individual page and post level. This makes perfect sense, because each individual page on your site is designed to achieve a specific purpose and will therefore need an appropriate, individualised layout that supports that purpose. The last thing that you want is a theme that limits you to just one or two layouts for the entire site.

Go for extensive and flexible configuration options

The more formatting elements the theme allows you to customise to your own unique business website requirements, the better.