If you are blogging on the WordPress platform, I should bet my complete savings that the very first thing you ever did was attempt to install a new WordPress theme. Yet, it is easy to understand why themes beg for so much attention.

So what factors do you need to think about to make this complete theme-hunting business easier? Here are 5 crucial ones :

1 ) Theme Width and Columns

Often WordPress themes come in 2-column or 3-column formats, with widths from five hundred pixels to 960 pixels wide. If you are blogging for non-profit purposes, a 2-column theme can look more compact and reader-friendly.

Since you have less pictures of products or links to other sites to display, you can focus completely on the content without leading readers away from your website.

On the other hand, if you are blogging for profit, you may wish to consider a 3-column WordPress theme which will be in a position to accommodate your Google Adsense, Chitika and Text Link advertisements codes nicely without squeezing everything in the content area. 3-column themes allow room for enlargement, but in the event that you have filled up all available space with adverts, then it’s time you took away the non-performers and use only the advertising services that work for that particular blog.

2) Use of Pictures and Icons

A theme with photographs and icons can look good, but it seldom increases your web traffic or customer base. In reality, most ‘A-list’  bloggers have plain vanilla themes with a straightforward logo on top. Reducing the quantity of photographs also implies quicker loading time and lower stress on your servers. This critical facet of server load become obvious only if you have many thousands of visitors a day, but it is worth planning for the future. An image-laden theme also distracts readers from the content itself.

This is the explanation why blogs like Engadget and Tech Crunch use photographs intensively in the content areas to add price to a post, but the theme itself is easy and rather minimalist. Ideally, a theme should let you use your own header image for stronger branding purposes, yet replace pictures and icons with links and text, or merely not use them at all unless fully obligatory.

3 ) Compatibility with Plugins

Another time-sucking activity is installing plugins that improve the functionality of your website.

There is a plugin out there for virtually everything you would like to do with your blog, but while many of them are free and simply obtainable, it isn’t always simple to install the plugins and insert the codes into your WordPress theme. If your theme is too advanced, it could be a headache to even insert that one line of code you want to make a plugin work.

This is commonly the case with complicated AJAX-based WordPress themes that have too many files and heavy coding. I have always preferred an easier themes that stick to the default WordPress theme as much as humanly possible, so I’m able to cut down on the learning curve and just get on with my life.

4) SEO

A lot can be recounted about SEO, but at the end of the day if you have content worth reading eventually you will get the rankings you merit.

However, that does not imply that you do not need SEO, it simply means as far as optimization is worried all you must do is to make certain :

( a ) Your tags are formatted correctly, with the name of the post first followed by the name of the blog – some themes can do this mechanically without alteration to the code or use of a plugin

( b ) All your blog content titles use the H1 tag, with the main keywords used rather than non-descriptive text for better SEO significance

( b ) Your theme has clean source codes, and if at all possible all formatting is linked to an external CSS file which you can edit independently

5) Plug-And-Play Simplicity of Use

Can the theme be installed simply on an existing blog with no need to move things around? Can the same theme be used and customised simply on your other blogs? These are some extra things you will wish to consider when theme-shopping, particularly if each minute of down time on your blog might mean lost money.

Even though it’s tough to make comparisons thanks to the total amount of free and paid themes out there, it’s still a great idea to have a test blog site. Test any theme you plan on using, and guarantee your test blog is also fitted with all of the plugins and various widgets used on your real blog.

The very last thing you need is for your readers start to see unusual blunders on your blog. Rather than spending your time installing them, it could be wiser to outsource the task and focus more on your readers. Or, you can also wish to consider purchasing ‘plug-and-play’ themes for a fair cost.