If you're building a WordPress site, you might be asking yourself how to find the right theme for your business. There's a lot to consider. If you are new to WordPress, it can be an overwhelming task. There are thousands of themes on the market. Before you start hunting, I recommend you first take a look at what you need from your theme.
Assess Your Must Haves and Desires
Grab a pen and paper and write down what exactly you want on your website.
Your Comfort Level
Before you pull out your credit card, let's talk about you and your WordPress comfort level.
Brand New to WordPress – Not a Coder
Are you brand new to WordPress and need a drop and drag or visual builder style to help you put together your pages? One that comes with pre-built functional modules like a portfolio or fresh Masonry style look (like Pinterest) for your blog posts? Has a lot of cool sliders, video players, and other functionality?
Consider Divi from Elegant Themes. (Below is an image of what the backend of the page builder looks like). Full disclosure – I'm an affiliate for Elegant Themes, so these links are affiliate links. I've built multiple websites with this theme and used it to create some gorgeous sales pages/membership websites using Divi and ONTRAPORT.
What I like about Divi and Elegant Themes, they have an excellent support group and usually get back to you quickly. It's a beautiful looking theme, and highly flexible. You can also use their pre-built templates or create and export your own page templates. This is a huge perk for me. It means I can create the page structure once, save it as a template, and then on a brand new page, upload the template and quickly change the content. Love this! I can also export templates and use them on other Divi sites I build. So if you're considering having more than one website, it can be a time saver.
Divi offers you the backend build AND a front-end builder (see video below). The team from Elegant Themes is always looking to improve their customer experience and they have excellent customer service. The front-end builder allows you to see what you're doing and style it appropriately. It's also easy for clients to make a quick edit to text or swap out an image.
With Divi theme, anything you wish to accomplish is really just a google search away. Their is a loyal fan base of developers who offer code snippets.
Marketing Focused
If you don't want to spend money monthly on expensive services like LeadPages, but still want to turn your website into a landing page/marketing powerhouse—consider OptimizePress.
OptimizePress gives you high converting landing page templates (like LeadPages), integrates well with email marketing services like MailChimp, Aweber, and my favorite, ONTRAPORT.
It also has a whole slew of page templates, from landing pages to membership pages. And there's a marketplace for other templates you can purchase. Plus, like Divi, you can export page templates. It's also easy to copy a row from one page and add it to another page on the site—something Divi can't do.
You don't need to know how to code to build a beautiful site. In fact, I've just remade one of my websites using OptimizePress.
What I like about OptimizePress is that it is built for marketing. There is a whole launch suite feature that goes beyond what LeadPages can do in my opinion, and you have so much greater control over what the page looks like. Now, I've used LeadPages. I know the appeal. It's super easy to use and fast. There are lots of templates—but you know what? Everyone's opt-in funnel is starting to look similar because so many people are using it. It's not new. It's not easily customized beyond the box limitation. Give me customization any day of the week, and in my book that means OptimizePress.
Other features I love from OptimizePress:
- It's a flat fee for three websites. Not an outrageous price per month. $97 gets you everything you need, licensed for one year.
- You can build membership websites with it, and that's included in the price above.
- You can use it as a plugin or a theme—although I've had better success (no coding conflicts) with it uploading it as a theme.
- The support is great with a fast turnaround, and there's a video library to get you started.
- Everything lives on your domain (no ‘hosted' pages), so you get all the Google SEO juice.
What I'm not fond of is the theme is a hefty upload to your site and contains a ton of images for all of those pre-built page templates. However, you may easily delete them once your site is setup the way you want and you're not needing the templates. And you can upload those templates again from their user website if you need them for a new page. So this is a small burden that can be easily fixed by the end user.
I'm such a fan of OptimizePress, I built a course around using it called Build That Course—teaching how to build a membership website with OptimizePress. OptimizePress is truly an amazing value!
eCommerce
If you are planning on an eCommerce site, I recommend two shopping cart systems. Both have their own proprietary themes. Both are free for the basic setup, and you pay for add-ons for different functionalities.
WooCommerce, which works great with WooThemes as they are the maker of this plugin (hey, boom! Decision made!) and plays nicely with other themes as well. Google search “woocommerce wordpress themes” and you should be able to find many compatible themes. I also recommend searching the woocommerce forum/support documents or the theme you're looking to use with it to make sure there aren't any conflicts arising from other users.
WooCommerce has a bit of a learning curve for creating your products. There is a vernacular that you're going to have to buckle down and learn. It is not very intuitive in my opinion, but once you get everything setup, it works really well. WooCommerce has hundreds of add-ons, so you can actually build the system out to your needs. Keep in mind those add-ons cost money to renew every year.
The other option is iThemes Exchange, which will work great with many themes and especially iThemes Builder themes. I find Exchange to have a much easier to understand interface to get products up and running. Exchange is newer, so add-ons are being built for it. It does have the core add-ons to get you started.
Comfortable With Learning Some Code/Features
I started my web design business with iThemes Builder products. I'm a big fan of the Builder interface as it allows me to create many different layouts for a site. I also learned a lot of my coding through their training site. I've been a member for years.
Builder includes the theme you choose along with the core product. It also automatically creates a Child theme for you. A child theme is a folder that holds all your design customization so when you update the base theme (any theme) your design tweaks are not lost! Any theme you use, do the research on “child theme” to learn how to create one for that theme.
Builder has its own unique features, so if you purchase a theme you'll want to learn how to use it. They have a HUGE codex/knowledge base with how-to videos—and that's not the training site. These folks are really great at what they do, the code is clean and easy to target/tweak. They also have a widely used support forum.
Another highly reputable theme framework is Genesis from StudioPress. Genesis has a strong reputation and even stronger following. After I became more
comfortable with coding and learning how WordPress works/functions, I started using Genesis. The nice thing is, there are so many Genesis users that it is easy to find a solution by using Google.
What's different about Genesis—you'll need to become comfortable about learning hooks and how to implement them. It is basically telling the site where to “hook in” a piece of code. This typically means editing the functions.php file if you can't find a plugin to do what you want (there are a plethora of plugins out there that are Genesis specific). So learning a bit of code, searching for code snippets or becoming comfortable altering code may be part of your experience with a Genesis theme.
Buying a Theme
Consider your website a solid investment in your business. Does your theme need to be expensive? No, there are many trusted, quality themes from big name providers that are under $100. Do you need to purchase “all the themes”? Probably not, unless you’re in the web design business and will be using the variety of themes to offer your clients.
Checklist Before You Buy
There is a learning curve with EVERY theme. You will run into something that you want it to do and it’s simply not coded to perform that action. This is where many turn to plugins to solve a particular website need.
If you are purchasing a theme (which I recommend you do), then here’s a list of what I look at before buying.
- Does the theme provider have good reviews from users?
- What does their support and documentation area look like?
- Do they have video tutorials to help someone getting started with their theme?
- Are the materials easy to understand?
- What is the typical response time on getting a support ticket resolved?
- What are the licensing terms? Do you need to renew annually to keep the theme up-to-date? (Most themes do renew annually)
- Is there a user forum?
- Can you see client examples of websites they’ve created?
- Do you have to purchase expensive add-ons to get what you need? How much will that cost you?
- Is it compatible with things you already have such as your payment gateway/eCommerce or any individual plugins you want to use?
Bottom Line
Spending an hour researching will save you time and money in the long run. You want a theme that's responsive to screen size (all mentioned here have that capability) and will grow with your business.
