I’ve just finished revamping my photography blog (well it’s almost done, the portfolio pages need some work), and after the endless swearing and cursing that was involved I thought this would be a good blog topic.

I’ve been blogging for almost 5 years, and in that time I’ve changed themes umpteen times, and I’ve now used all the options available.  I’ve fought with endless free themes, until I succumbed to buying themes, and for this blog I was lucky enough to win a custom theme.  So in no particular order, I hope this list will help you if you’re on the hunt for a new WordPress theme.

1.  Know your limitations.  I may be quite happy to fiddle around with settings until I get them to work and find plugins to make my life easier, and I’m a google fundi when it comes to finding help, but I’m no code-head.  I can guess fumble my way through HTML and CSS to adjust the colours and the basic layouts, but I cannot possibly write a piece of code that’ll hugely improve the blog… so I need to find a theme whose blog code is stable, and well documented.  And the problem with free themes is that you do end up having to change the code quite a bit to get it to do what you want it to do.  If you’re happy doing that for hours on end, then go that route, it’ll save you money… but definitely not time.

2.  Richness of the CMS/admin section This is almost always non-existant on free themes (unless they’re premium themes, but even then the free theme’s admin sections are basic).  On a paid theme, like my photography blog theme, I expect the admin section (or plugin) to do everything for me.  I don’t want to have to fiddle in the code.  It has to be self explanatory, or very well documented (not one or two lines where you can see that the developer couldn’t think of what to write… it has to be written for laymen).  Now this is where the problem comes in… apart from a few screen dumps on trial pages, you can’t actually play around with the admin sections until you actually buy the theme… this is a massive flaw because you could end up with a blog that’s cost you a bomb and you need to be a code-head to get the thing to work!  Try and look at the sample images to work out how rich the admin section is and my advice is to also go through the support forum to see how to install it before you buy the theme.

3.  Flash headers and slide shows don’t work on iPad or iPhone, so if like me, you’re getting more and more hits from those devices and you don’t want to reduce your users experience of the site, steer clear of themes that use these (where you can’t change it for another type of slide show for example)

4.  Support.  Make sure the support for the theme is good.  I can’t stand having to email someone to get help.  That takes time to get a response, especially if you’re sitting in Africa and the developers are in the US or something.  The documentation online needs to be robust, and if you use Twitter like me, make sure the developers have a Twitter account and use it!!

5.  Flexibility.  Play around with the sample blog.  Make sure it’s as flexible as you need it to be.  Also make sure that you can adjust it in some way so that your site does look unique.  There’s no point spending a fortune on something and then your blog looks generic.    This is particularly relevant for custom blogs where it’s really not a cheap exercise.

6.  Usability.  Again, play with the sample blog.  If you struggle to find our way around it, then guaranteed your readers will too.  Think about how easy it is to navigate around it… a blog may be a personal journal… but it’s online for other people to read.  If they can’t understand how to get around it, then they won’t come back again.

Let me know in the comments if you’ve learnt any hard lessons about blog theme buying recently.

Anyhoo, that was quite a braindump… let me get back to my editing. Hope you found it interesting and slightly helpful.