i just made my first ever wordpress site and one of my developer buddies wasn’t crazy about my choice of theme, but hasn’t been able to really articulate why or how to do it better. since then i’ve been struggling to figure out how to intelligently choose themes in general: should i just buy one of the three most popular ones on themeforest because they’re fast, have good support, and have been proven intelligent ways of using wordpress as a CMS, or get one that looks similar to what i envision my site to be?

i’m about to launch my own daily photography site–i’d like it to basically look like what i have up at www.nolaerrday.com, but when you click an image, it’ll send you to a page where you can buy it at various sizes, framed/unframed, etc. it’d also be awesome if rather than being stuck with a strict 3-column masonry layout, i could also have some “rows” with 5 columns or have horizontal images take up a whole column. aside from that, it’d of course be great if it were fast, but i’m also confused as to how much this has to do w/ theme vs. the server the site’s running on.

i’ve been stuck at this point for about two weeks! if anyone could weigh in, it’d really help me get unstuck!! thank you!

alec

1. Do premium themes allow trials before purchasing?

2. Are there any techniques, tricks, guidelines or suggestions for efficiently finding the best theme for a particular need.

3. Does anybody have recommendations for themes (and plugins) for a site that sells tours, activities and transportation in a specific country, with a dozen destinations and dozens of activities, tours, and hotels in each destination. I sell my tour and my transportation service, and I sell other companies’ tours, transportation and lodging as an agent. I also want the site to be content rich like a guide book. Any suggestions for themes and plugins?

I have checked out other threads and not found any answers thus far, so here I am.
I am looking for a theme, low $ premium or maybe even free if it has the following:

Ability to have Google AdSense, etc
E-commerce
Heavy content
One and Two columns
Video etc.

I know I can make changes to how things look with CSS & that plugins will take care of most of the galleries and videos, etc. Okay, so knowing all of that, am i limited with most themes? Should I only check out certain types?
Thanks in advance!

In your opinion,
– what are some of the most customizable Free Themes?
-Are things a whole lot easier (esp for the newbie) if you just purchase from somewhere (elegant themes?genesis?etc?)

For my site, I am going for a site/blog hybrid (aka doesn’t look bloggy).

Thank you! Kayla Cait

Any suggestions on how to see more than the 10 featured themes? I ‘d like to look at one of the 1,271 other ones? Thanks