Design - Selecting A Theme.

Selecting a Theme for Your Website
There’s almost no limit to the variety in designs and functionality that a WordPress website can have. It’s a completely flexible platform and there are more different visual styles (themes) for WordPress available than you could see in your lifetime.
The biggest problem with picking a theme is the sheer amount of them on offer. It’s a complete overload and you could easily spend days just browsing different options.
In this chapter, I want to show you how and where you can find a great theme for your site and give you some pointers on what you should be aware of when choosing one.
Where to Find Themes
One simple option is to browse for them right from within your admin panel. In the right sidebar, click on the “Appearance” tab. From there, you can select “Add New Themes” to start browsing a vast selection of them. 

Just to give this a try, tick two of the options on the search page. For example: “Right Sidebar” and your favourite colour. Then, click on “Find Themes”.  
You’ll see a wide range of choices being presented.
You can click on the “Prevew” link for any of the themes to get an idea of what the theme would look like in action.
To install a theme on your blog, simply click on the “Install” link in the theme description and then click on the “Install Now” button in the window that opens. This will initiate an automatic installation, after which you can choose to preview the theme, return to the themes menu or activate the theme right away.

You can install as many themes as you like and switch between them through the “Appearance” -> “Themes” menu in the sidebar of your WordPress admin panel. 
How to Pick a Good Theme
There are millions of themes to pick from, but how do you find a winner? Here are the most important criteria to look out for:

Subjective Impression This is a big one, obviously. The theme needs to appeal to you personally. No matter how good the features of a theme are, if you don’t like it’s looks, you’ll never be completely happy with your blog. 
 Uncluttered Look for themes that aren’t overloaded with stuff. Generally, one content area and one sidebar is a good guideline to go for. Multiple sidebars and too many widget-areas tend to make a blog look messy and disorganized. When it comes to design, I always use “less is more” as a guideline. 
 Loading Speed This is extremely important. Take notice of the loading speed of the theme’s demo site and also test the loading speed once you’ve installed the theme on your site and added your plugins. People’s attention spans are getting shorter every day and if your pages take 10 seconds to load, you’ll probably lose half your visitors before
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your content even shows up. 
 Last Updated/Support/Comments Check to see when the theme was last updated, whether there are positive or negative comments about it and whether there’s any possibility of getting support. Be cautious of themes that haven’t seen updates in a long time. 
If you start Googling for WordPress themes, you’ll quickly come across so-called “Premium” themes, which come at a certain price. Some sites offer custom-built themes, others offer highly customizable themes (i.e. where you do the customizing yourself) and others again offer ready- made, but non-customizable themes.
Free themes are generally fine to start out with, although they do come with a few drawbacks. A common issue with free themes is a lack of maintenance. Often, there’s no one actively working to keep a free theme up-to-date with the latest WordPress version, keeping it compatible with various plugins, fixing bugs etc. Also, free themes usually don’t come with any kind of support.
With a premium theme, someone’s getting paid to maintain the theme and offer support.
For this reason, I’m using paid themes on all of my websites.  Not everything you pay for is automatically better than what you can get for free, so here’s a quick guide to some premium themes:
 Thesis Theme This one is extremely popular and there’s no end to blogs running on this platform. Personally, I don’t recommend it and I think

it’s vastly overrated. I’ll spare you all the details, but just be aware that Thesis is not very beginner friendly. To fully make use of the customization features, you need to manually write CSS. Otherwise, your site will just end up looking like every other Thesis site out there 
 Elegant Themes I also need to mention Elegant Themes. The themes on offer are very well designed and can be used for many different purposes. Every theme also comes with an extensive and easy-to-use customization menu and there are usually several theme-colours available to choose from. Best of all, the themes are so cheap, it’s almost a no-brainer to get them. Check out their theme collection here. 

Themeforest is a marketplace where you can find WordPress themes created by talented designers and developers from all corners of the world. The quality standard is extremely high and especially for professional and portfolio-style themes, Themeforest is the place to check out.
And that’s it for my premium themes recommendations. That’s not to say there aren’t more options available, but the above represent the cream of the crop.

If you decide to go for a premium theme, you will have to upload the files to your server manually. The same is true for a few free themes and plugins for WordPress, as they are not all available through the official WordPress site. In any case, you will have to learn to manually edit the files on your server, so this is a good opportunity to do so.

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