I had started to look at Wordpress as a blogging software solution long before my niche found me, and I had decided that one thing that would be important to me was to have some graphic at the top of the page to help “Brand” my site. The problem was the default settings for Wordpress didn’t allow this. So I needed something else. That’s when I started learning about Themes. Wordpress uses Themes, a collection of files that determine how your site looks, from font size and color all the way up to page layout, color, and graphics. The great thing about themes is you can change them relatively easy; once they are loaded onto your site, changing to your new theme is as easy as one click. So you can upload a ton of themes and experiment with each of them with the click of the mouse.
Once I determined my niche, I went in search of the perfect theme. All the themes I have experimented with come from a site called Theme Viewer. My criteria was straight forward; I wanted a theme that had two side bars on the same side. The reason I wanted this layout was because I had seen another site that had done something I thought at the time was brilliant; this other site had two side bars side by side, they used the outside bar for navigation information, and the inside bar for advertising. Think about it, every time a person moved their eyes and pointer from the main content to the navigation bar and back, they must cross the advertising section. Great! I also wanted to find a site that supported widgets. With all the great plugins I was learning about, and with Wordpress’s newest release supporting widgets, it seemed best to set myself up with a theme that could use them.
So I began my search and combed dozens of pages of two-side-barred, widget ready themes until I found the theme that I now use. Though I had limited my criteria to the previously mentioned two things, I was pleased to find that the theme I chose also had the following benefits: It was fast loading, it loaded content first ( a must for search engine optimization), and the files were laid out in an easy to understand manner, making modification easy. And it looked clean, and that translated into professional.
It was a good place to start. In a latter post I will go into more detail as to how I set about modifying the theme to suit my needs and why I made the changes I did.
