WordPress Tutorial Series : Choosing a Perfect WordPress Theme

WordPress Tutorial Series is a continuation of articles with a broad view for the new WordPress users. In this article, we will discuss about WordPress Themes. For the readers who are reading this WordPress Tutorial part for the first time, might be interested to read our previously published article on WordPress Tutorial Series :

What is WordPress and How it Works

Finding a Suitable Web Host or Server

Installing WordPress on your Server

Post Installation Works For WordPress

WordPress Tutorial Series : Must Have WordPress Plugins

WordPress Tutorial Series : Stepping in to First Setup?

WordPress Tutorial Series : Basics about HTML and CSS

Other two relevant articles are :

WordPress Premium Themes And Theme Platforms Review

Design WordPress themes without knowing CSS with WP Paintbrush

Why a separate WordPress Tutorial on selecting WordPress Themes ?

There are many tit bits are involved while choosing a WordPress Theme or Theme platform. Design of a Theme is very crucial, the biggest problem is either you can a designer easily or a coder easily who can code a well optimized WordPress custom Theme. A well optimized custom WordPress custom Theme or Child Theme can cost few thousand dollars. As most of the new users can not pay few thousand dollars, we will point out what to look for while choosing a WordPress Theme in this.

As like web hosting, despite we are customers of two great premium Theme framework, we will not use a single affiliate link (or even a hyperlink) unlike those websites which publishes “pre-designed to make a new user fool” articles.

WordPress Tutorial for selecting WordPress Theme

So the main target of this WordPress Tutorial starts here. An ideal WordPress Theme should have these features :

• Must load within 1.5 seconds when the “dry website” with webpagetest.org web page speed testing tool (Dallas, Texas). Dry website means with average number of images, no Adverts.
• Must pass to be a valid xHTML theme when dry. Ads, social buttons can insert invalid chars; they will not matter to a crawler, your theme should itself must pass W3C test. W3C test for CSS is not so important, still its good to have a valid CSS.
• All theme images must be already compressed and optimized.
• Should have hooks in addition to WordPress default.
• Custom and individualized look is important
• Theme creator should have existing customer support.

Other than WordPress default, we found that only three Theme creators are perfect – Genesis, Thesis and Woo. The default WordPress Theme is usually very stable. If you can not afford any premium Theme Framework + Custom Child Theme, it is better to use the default one and customize its CSS for own look.