How do I evaluate themes?

  • This is not a question on any particular theme – this is about themes in general. I’m working on a book website. I want to find a theme that will let me put an image on my opening home page with a menu to go deeper. Interior pages can have headers, sidebars, widgets, whatever. Those pages will be mostly text, nothing fancy. I should probably have a easy to use something-or-other to buy the book on every page. And I’ll probably have some blog posts.

    I’ve lost count of the number of themes I’ve looked at. The descriptions all say the same thing. They’re all beautiful, they’re all responsive. They all have elegant typography. Most are modern. Many are minimalist. Some have sleek designs. What does any of this mean? And I haven’t found any that offer a unique “cover” page or home page that looks different than the rest of the website. I am a rookie designing websites and it’s possible what I want to do is a dumb idea. If so, just say so and it won’t hurt my feelings.

    I’ve looked at demos, but the demos I’ve seen so far are not helpful. How do experienced web designers evaluate WordPress themes? Short of buying themes and spending hours experimenting with each one, how do you get past the flowery descriptions to find out what they can really do?

    thanks

    – Greg Scott

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  • The one thing I look for when I evaluate a theme is how much can I customize it “out of the box” without having to resort to creating a child theme. Mostly it’s because I support a few different sites (one is for a sports team, two different religious organizations, another is a business-related site, and the last is a charitable organization). I want to be able to use one theme across each of them, even though each has different needs and looks. In some cases, I needed to be able to mimic the appearance of an existing, non-Wordpress site and convert it to a WordPress site without a drastic change in appearance or functionality.

    I don’t look at commercial themes because I want to actually install the theme and work with it; I only look at the themes in the WordPress Theme repository. If I find a theme that looks interesting, I install it straight from the WordPress admin dashboard, I don’t have to worry about downloading & re-uploading via FTP. It’s actually a very quick process. I have a sandbox (i.e., test) site where I’ve installed over a hundred different themes, and I can easily switch between them.

    The one theme that I’ve settled on for my production sites, though, is Montezuma. It is highly customizeable, because it allows you to change every aspect of the appearance, plus it’s easy to create custom templates for special pages that differ in appearance from the rest of the site. You can see a sampling of different sites that were creating using the theme at this post (only one of those sites is my own). If you have a decent knowledge of HTML and CSS, I would check the theme out.

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