Selecting Your Wordpress Theme Wordpress uses templates, otherwise known as Themes to define the look, feel, and functionality of a blog. The Theme you choose is not only the face you present to the world through your blog, it provides a wide range of functionality. We'll look at three different companies who provide quality themes. There are many others, and of course you can hire a web designer to create a custom theme, but you can figure on paying at least $1200-$1500 for a quality custom theme. I chose these three companies because of their reputation, the quality of their themes, the flexibility the themes provide, and the quality of their support. The themes are: 1. The Thesis Theme - http://diythemes.com/ 2. Rocket Themes - http://www.rockettheme.com/wordpress 3. ithemes - http://www.ithemes.com/ I'll review each of these themes and why I like them (in reverse order) because we'll be building our blog using the Thesis Theme. I'll explain why in a moment. The ithemes Wordpress Themes I've used a number of their themes for my blogs because they provide professional "static" home pages and nice blog layouts. With a static home page you can have your blog look like a squeeze page or an older-style web site. However, once they click on a link to a blog post, it acts just like any other Wordpress blog with widgets in sidebars, commenting, and everything else you'll come to love in Wordpress. In addition, ithemes announced (in December, 2009) a new theme called the "Builder" theme. The Builder theme rivals Thesis for customizability, and may in fact offer considerably more customization without any programming knowledge. However, with flexibility comes complexity, so if you've got an artistic bent, give the Builder theme a try. I believe that this is the future of themes - advanced customization. Nobody wants to learn CSS, HTML or PHP to build a better blog... and they certainly don't want their blog to look like every other blog. Creating Your First Blog - Themes Page 1
In this tutorial, we'll build our blog with the Thesis theme because it's easy to do basic customization (and because I have a copy of the theme). I highly encourage you to check out the Builder Theme from ithemes. Here are a few screen shots of their themes: Creating Your First Blog - Themes Page 2
Creating Your First Blog - Themes Page 3
Rocket Themes I've used Rocket Themes for years, but not for Wordpress. I've used their Joomla (another Content Management System) themes and have been exceptionally happy with the quality and the support. Their Wordpress themes use many of the features of their Joomla themes, making them FAR more elaborate (and complicated) than any other themes on the market today. The Rocket Theme Wordpress themes are great for multi-media blogs or magazine-style blogs. If you're creating a blog that will have a constant stream of new material, much of which is video or multi-media, then look into the Rocket Theme themes. The learning curve will be a bit more than most other themes, but as you can see by the examples, the themes are beautiful and feature-rich. Each theme comes with several theme variations, giving you five or more color combinations. This is right out of the box, so that you can easily change from one style to another without knowing any code or diddling with the CSS file. Here are a couple of their themes: Creating Your First Blog - Themes Page 4
Creating Your First Blog - Themes Page 5
Solar Sentinel Creating Your First Blog - Themes Page 6
As you can see, their themes are complex and feature-rich. This also means that they'll take a lot longer to create and build. It all depends on what you want to accomplish with your site. If you're planning on a full-featured e-commerce site with frequent updates, feeds from other sources, and lots of activity, then these themes would be perfect. However, they're not for the faint of heart or for more simple blogs. The Thesis Theme The Thesis Theme is probably the most popular Wordpress theme on the market today, and for good reason. It's easy to install, easy to customize, and easy to use. It's also reasonably priced, which helps those of us on limited budgets. The downside of the Thesis theme is that it's a blog, pure and simple. It doesn't have the bells and whistles that you'll see on the home page of one of the Rocket Theme templates, and it doesn't come with a static home page that looks like a standard business web site (as with many of the itheme templates). But... what it does, it does well. It helps you to build a fairly standard information-based blog that's designed for people who simply want to post their ideas online. One of the nice things about the Thesis theme is that Theme users are constantly creating and updating custom code that enhances the usability of the theme. For example, one user created some special code that created a "Drop-up" menu system to replace the customary drop-down menu: Just browse the "Showcase" at the Thesis Theme site, and you'll see a wide range of designs, most of which simply used the basic customization features of the theme (no special coding). Below Creating Your First Blog - Themes Page 7
are a few samples. In the next section, we'll talk more about installing the Thesis theme and customizing it to meet our desired look and feel (including a custom header image). Yes, the following are ALL the same Thesis theme, customized by the user. Creating Your First Blog - Themes Page 8