Naos Media WEB Design

Searching for the perfect WordPress Gallery themes for your website or blog can be a time consuming process. There are thousands of nice themes available for WordPress both free and premium. This is one of the main reasons for its popularity. But all of these options can every so often make the decision even more hard.

A good place to start is to consider if you are willing to pay for the theme. In some cases this pays off long term when you need support. E.g. when WordPress needs to be upgraded. Most WordPress sites and blogs start op with a free or premium theme that have been altered a bit to make it distinctive. This can be by changing colors, header graphics etc.

From experience I have leaned that the following things are worth thinking through before choosing a theme:

1. Making an income from a website is indeed out times great opportunity, but is this your intention for this website? In this case it is a good idea to go for a premium theme. They are commonly implemented on mature frameworks and comes with support that can be critical when WordPress needs to be upgraded. Using a free theme may be OK for you if you are setting up a small website, personal or family blog, however remember that any commercial and non-commercial website will benefit from a premium theme for several reasons. Keep in mind that even though some effort is needed you can pick another theme later.

2. Will the look of your site have any impact on your success? If you are planning to create a personal website or blog you will be Okay with a free theme in most cases For a businesses attempting to pass on a professional image, spending the money for a professional theme design is justified. This is not different from making an investment in design of company collaterals. It is all about online presence and positive brand building.

3. Is the wordpress theme you consider used by many other websites? It is worth noting that some of the more popular free themes are used by thousands of blogs. Using such a theme for sure makes it tricky to build a exclusive presence, but there are advantages as well. Popular themes are popular for a reason and in particular people go for a strong community, good support, regular updates and flexibility.

4. How much have the developer done to optimize the theme for search engines? Typically free themes are not coming with professional SEO tools. If you are not familiar with SEO, PHP and HTML it may be complicated for you to rate the SEO capabilities of a theme. In this case, a solid decision is to take a premium theme from one of the major theme vendors or choose one of the popular and widely used free SEO-ready themes.

5. Can the design of the theme be easily updated to fit your needs? A good "Options page" is essential for most of us and I would say even critical if you do not know PHP, HTML and CSS very well. Having a theme with a powerful options page will keep you from digging into the code for just doing simple changes everyone have to do. Further a theme with multiple color schemes, page templates, build in widgets and so on really can make a difference. As you can understand it simply opens up for the possibilities and allow you to create an unique online presence.

6. If you have a logo, does it match the theme? With free themes it is not always working well when a logo is added to the header, even though everything else about it is perfect. Keep this in mind and select the theme to match the logo you have making sure that style, colors etc. fit together.

7. Will the theme support widgets? If you plan to make a lot of changes to the sidebar, footers etc. and you don't want to mess with the code you need to choose a widget ready theme.

8. Is support available? Support is critical if you are not a technical genius yourself. Any upgrade of WordPress may require updates in the theme and trust me - keeping WordPress updated is so important for security reasons. Also support can be great if you want to do something out of the ordinary with the theme and can't make it work yourself Most of the larger premium theme vendors provide high quality support and have a strong forum and community. Some free theme designers will provide limited support and others (vast majority) will provide none. Think ahead and make sure you are not saving little now with the risk of paying a lot at a later stage. Once you have live users hitting it changes are harder to carry out However if you know WordPress theme development, PHP, HTML, CSS etc. yourself you may not worry about it too much

9. ?d the themes prepared for monetization? If you have any thoughts or intentions of monetizing your website or blog you should take this into consideration when choosing a theme. If it is part of the strategy, adding ads to a theme is simple for a web developer, but for most people it important that the theme comes with an ad management solution. Themes with a build ad management solution has also been prepared for it in the design.

10. Even good looking themes may not have good code! About 99% of bloggers and webmaster probably don't care if the code validate, but some do because they know better. While browsers tend to ignore coding errors valid code is a lot more likely to provide a strong presentation for your visitors. A great-looking, valid theme may also rank better in search engines as their indexing of the content is not disturbed by the code errors.

Recently Google updated their ranking logic and now it actually take a lot more factors into consideration and adding some keywords is far from enough any more.

11. Is the theme developer a generous and skilled developer or...? Question is if the theme is free (sounds good right) but only released to the public because someone have added hidden links to build backlinks to some porn or poker site... You might be surprised how many free themes include some form of hidden links to build backlinks to sneaky marketers sites. If you are not sure how to look for hidden link then consider using one of the more popular free themes or even premium theme.