Searching for a suitable WordPress theme for your website can be a tiring fair. It usually begins with an optimism that you will find the perfect design, but it soon becomes a time-consuming task when you do not find the right theme within the first few days.
Over the last seven years, I have used WordPress for all of my content based websites. Therefore, I have been in the position of looking for a new design more times than I care to remember. Sometimes it takes days, sometimes it takes weeks.
My recent search was for a suitable blog design for this blog. I briefly touched upon the frustration of finding this new design yesterday. Over the course of a few weeks, I looked over close to one thousand themes, checked out the demo thoroughly of at least one hundred more, and tested around a dozen or so free themes from WordPress.org.
It did not take me long to be reminded that designers rarely understand the needs of bloggers. This is more apparent in a marketplace such as ThemeForest. Most of the designs that are sold there try to do everything. They can be used for a business, for a portfolio, for a blog, for an online shop, for a community. These designs are versatile, but they are not always the best solution for any one thing. This is particularly true for blogs that do not need additional functionality built-in like review systems, rating systems, eCommerce integration etc.
The designs that were created specifically for blogs sometimes place an emphasis of style over substance. Take navigation, for example. Rather than just use a traditional menu in the header, many designers are trying to make their designs “sexier” by making the menus discrete. Cool, yes. Practical, no.
The design Reblog is an example of this (though perhaps not the best example). It places a small menu icon at the top of its beautiful design. Visitors need to click on the icon in order to open up the navigation menu. A few other designs hid the sidebar completely and only displayed it if the cursor was moved to the side of the page.
Another big problem that I see with most of the designs on ThemeForest is the featured image. The blog template always includes massive featured images. These images are sometimes 1,000 pixels in width and several hundred pixels in height.
This presents a lot of problems.
Firstly, finding super sized images every time I want to publish a post is a real pain in the ass. It is not so bad for travel bloggers who are uploading photographs with every single article; however, for most people it means paying money for high quality images from a stock image service. This is also time-consuming, which means you are unlikely to complete a post in thirty minutes.
Secondly, the blog templates are not flexible. They are set up to be used in one way and one way only. The design will look super cool if you upload a 1,000 by 650 pixel featured image; however if you upload an image that is 200 by 200 pixels, the whole design gets messed up. Designers usually reply to complaints about this from buyers with something along the lines of “The theme was not supposed to be set up that way”. This forces you to either use a ridiculously large featured image for every post, or abandon the theme and try something else.
A good example of this is Leaf.
ThemeForest currently has around four thousand WordPress themes, so I do understand the argument that there is something for everyone there. I am not complaining for the sake of complaining. It just surprises me that few designers are designing traditional blog designs for the premium market. Particularly as there is an abundance of blog designs in the WordPress.org theme directory. A large percentage of the themes on sale there look great, but are not really practical for blogs.
StudioPress seem to be one of the few theme stores that understand the needs of bloggers. MyThemeShop is another. Their designs are not always pretty or flashy, however they are perfect for blogs that are publishing content every day.
What’s your thoughts on this? Do you think designers need to pay more attention to bloggers and think more about the practical aspects of a blog design?
Kevin
I’ve personally tuned out of WordPress theme marketplaces basically because of rough experiences. In my experience the eye candy marketplaces don’t deliver. The themes look great but when you purchase a theme and try to change something, the design gets messed up or doesn’t look as good like you pointed out. Also the customer support is usually not that good.
The more functional themes like those from StudioPress are more adaptable but the designs in my opinion are fairly plain and boring.
If I buy something in the future it’ll probably be from an established company like Elegant Themes and I’ll be sure to get one of your cookies from one of your affiliate links. Simply my way of thanking you for your informative blogging.
I have found the same. If you buy a theme from a marketplace, you need to keep your fingers crossed that it sells well. Otherwise, it is unlikely that the developer will support it and fix bugs etc.
Elegant Themes offer great value for money. You cannot argue with the number of themes they offer for $69 per year.
Thanks for supporting the site. 🙂
That’s the reason I love StudioPress.
But sometimes having a one-in-all theme like Divi from Elegant Themes gives you opportunity to create hundreds of sites for clients using the same theme (so you mastered settings and modifications). Anyway, I think that integrating 100000+ Google fonts, 10 sliders, 100 features is useless, just makes site slower. The only one theme that is said to be fast and has a lot of features is PowerMag from TF, but even that I don’t believe it will score 96 in Google Speed or AA on gtmetrix on cheap hosting (demo is on WPEngine).
That’s all 😉
I have noticed that the majority of designers are using caching plugins and content delivery networks to ensure that their themes appear to be super fast. It’s an effective way of masking some of the problems a theme may have.
The Divi theme from Elegant Themes is a versatile design. I will be doing a tutorial about it on Elegant Themes next week. Looking forward to checking it out.
Kevin
All the commenters above made some good points, but I’d like to point out there’s a fourth hybrid option which I’ve found to be perfect for control, flexibility and still having “fancy eye-candy” like the premium themes, when you want it… It’s the best of all worlds in my opinion.
Genesis + Dynamik + Visual Composers
– Dynamik/Extender are plugins from a genesis competitor who now turned genesis add-on maker.
Basically with dynamik you can build custom genesis themes in a “drag & drop” fashion (well its more switches and dropdown, but same point, you don’t need to be a programmer.
With “extender” you can take studiopress child-themes and tweak them to your needs, adding and removing widgetized areas and restyling the child-theme
-Visual composers and front-page editors allow you to drog and drop fancy features and elements onto a page
There’s some really good ones on code-canyon now, and most cost half of the price of a premium theme. If you use these, you can add all those fancy sliders, scroll-triggered animations, parallax sections, animated progress bars, testimonial boxes and what not.
The trick I use is:
1) I take a studiopress child theme I like.
2) Use extender to add widgetized sections
3) Put in a “genesis featured page” widget and set it to a page which I built with one of the visual composers.
Honestly, if you learn just CSS, you can recreate most premium themes out there without ever needing to know PHP or wordpress coding (with dynamik, visual composers and addons this is no longer required).
Thanks for the suggestion Alek.
I do know CSS, well, at least the basics 🙂
I actually did an article about visual composers for a WordPress website last month. Some of them were really good, however it was not something that I considered for my website. I didn’t think they were necessary as I was just looking for a traditional blog layout of the content area and the sidebar.
Apologies for the bad-grammar and lack of editing on that comment. It turned into a mini article, where originally I just wanted to make a short-comment on the whole genesis vs premium themes thingie 😀 One more point…
Or javascript, or jquery or all that other fancy stuff – since a visual composer replaced the need for you to know all that fancy jquery stuff.
Really, if we’re taking the 90/10 principle, any blogger online can do wonders if they just learn a little genesis* + solid CSS skills. If you’re smart you can achieve similar results as high-end developers and do it on a dime.
*-Or any of the other frameworks Kevin has reviewed…
Actually I just discovered your blog a few hours ago, and I’ve spent the afternoon skimming through your posts. I’m loving it. 😀 I learned a ton today and made about a dozen bookmarks.
Do you have any “recommendations” page with aff-links I can bookmark so I can pay back the favor?
p.s.
Comment was directed to the discussion (just sharing tips with fellow readers). I already see you’re much better versed in making use of WP, I learned a ton from you today!
Glad you like the blog Alek. I appreciate the gesture, though there is no need. I’m happy for readers to just comment and spread the word 🙂
If you are looking for useful links, check out my resources section.