Tips to Choose the Best WordPress Theme for Your Blog

Many people know that blogging is one of the important characteristics of the new web trends and web 2.0 technologies. It allows any individual or company to build active friendly relations between the publisher of the blog and the readers. Blogging can be used for many purposes such as expressing your own ideas and spreading it to the world or promoting your company and using it to support your business by building better relations between you and your readers.

Recently, blogging business is proved to provide profits and becomes one of the methods to drive revenues through the web. Most bloggers are not developer or designers. They are just talking about what they think or what they love to talk about. Blogging is dependent on a Content Management Systems (CMS) such as WordPress or MovableType … etc.

These blogging CMS solutions provide an easy method to blog for non-technical internet users without requiring reading any developing tools; one of the most used CMS solutions for blogging is WordPress. Since most WordPress blogs have similar features based on the CMS, choosing the best theme is one of the most important tasks to make your blog attractive and to serve the content well. Although you can create the theme through custom design, there are advantages to getting a ready-made theme, especially for bloggers that don’t have experience in design or developing. Using a ready-made theme is also cheaper than a custom-built theme.
In this article, we will learn how to choose the best theme for your blog and what themes will suit your blog best.

Why WordPress?

Although there are other blogging systems, WordPress provides an optimum blogging solution due to many reasons such as:
It provides a free solution for blogger that seek a way to give their voice and ideas a place on the new web trends.

1. WordPress is an easy to learn and use solution that barely needs a training. All you have to do is to install it and navigate through it to start blogging on the web. As a designer with no coding experience, I was able to get started very quickly.
2. WordPress is an open-source solution. When you search for WordPress resources, you will find a huge number of themes, assets and tutorials to use WordPress and how to customize it to your needs.
3. WordPress is compatible with many servers and you can find it ready to install on many servers by default. It can be used with most servers on both cheap hosting and expensive hosting packages.
4. You can fully customize WordPress by adding features or modules through variety number of WordPress plugins that are everywhere on the web.

These reasons promote WordPress to be the best CMS solution for blogging for both professional bloggers and casual bloggers who write as a hobby.

What are you blogging about?

Choosing your blog topic is based on two factors, the first is related to you and your capabilities and the second is based on the needs of the market. When you first think of creating your first blog, you have to think about your capabilities, what can you excel in and provide useful information to the readers and interact with them regarding? For example, many graphic designers think about creating blogs to provide design tutorials and articles related to a certain field. Actually, it can be a method to gain profits and promote designer skills as described in my article Quick Guide for Freelancers to do Well in Recession.

The idea behind choosing a topic that you can cover well is that blogging is a continuous process. You need to post on a regular basis to keep the relation between you and your readers. You also need to provide unique resources and ideas to your readers which are useful in their life and career.

The second factor is related to the market and how many users take interest in your blog topic. The more popular topics drive more traffic to your site and give your blog a better chance to gain traffic and revenues. Popular topics can have many competing blogs in the web, but you still have the chance to drive more traffic to your site by providing unique ideas and topics that are not covered anywhere else.
Also, you can search for the topic you would like to blog about and see its popularity and how other bloggers cover this topic. When you find some topics, you can see how people search for it and its searching volume using Google Keyword tool.

What services will you provide in your blog?

Before choosing your blog, it is very important to plan what services you will add to your blog because you will need to find the best theme that also works well with the user interface of your services. For example, if you plan to add a discussion forum to your blog, you need to choose a wider theme that can fit as a container for your forum.

Choose your blog theme

WordPress is similar to other CMS systems when it comes to the design of the site. It is based on design templates which are themes. Choosing the theme that suits your site topic is very important for the success of your blog and will help you in using the right functions to serve your content and readers as well.
Some WordPress themes are suitable for company sites that are based on WordPress, others are more suitable for heavy content blogs such as news and technology blogs. After choosing your blog topic, you can search for the themes that suit your blog through a huge number of themes on the web. Some themes are free and can be downloaded with a simple mouse click and others are paid which must be purchased. Below are some resources for free and paid themes that you can start with:

Free WordPress themes:

http://wparchive.com/

http://www.freewpthemes.net/

http://wordpress.org/extend/themes/

http://www.themes2wp.com/

http://www.skinpress.com/

http://www.woothemes.com/category/themes/free/

http://www.themelab.com/free-wordpress-themes/

http://www.templatesbrowser.com/wordpress-themes/

http://www.themesplice.com/

http://www.themewp.net/

Paid WordPress themes:

http://www.premiumwp.com/

http://www.freshsites.com/wordpress-theme/

http://www.studiopress.com

http://www.elegantthemes.com/

http://www.nattywp.com/

http://themeforest.net/

http://www.woothemes.com/

As we mention above, you have to choose the theme that fits with your blog topic and its amount of content. Here are some examples of WordPress themes that are suitable for specific blogging topics.

Corporate WordPress themes

These blogs include a lot of information that require frequent updates and display a lot of content on the homepage. These themes suit larger amounts of content.

Portfolio WordPress themes

Portfolio sites focus more on the images and work examples along with the blog capabilities. So, portfolio sites include the ability to showcase work.

News and magazines WordPress themes

These blogs include a lot of information that require frequent updates and display a lot of content on the homepage. These themes suit larger amounts of content.

Clean style WordPress themes

If you like to give full focus on content, these types of themes include a very light amount of graphic elements and design to let the reader concentrate more on the content.

Design WordPress themes

Designer and design lovers seek not only design content, but also love to see creative site designs or blog designs that provide them with unique experiences when they visit the site or the blog.

Personal blog WordPress themes

These include the common functions and structure of the blog as we all know it; it does not include specific features or special design that is directed to a certain type of reader. These are suitable for most blog topics.

Conclusion

Blogging is a very successful business and a great hobby to express yourself and spread your ideas to the world. Building your blog correctly and updating it frequently can turn it into a center point for web readers to get resources, ideas and information from you. Good planning is important to turn your blog into a successful experience that you can surely enjoy and benefit from.