Where To Find Good Wordpress Themes
Day 44 of The 100 Days To Building A Great Website Guide
One problem I have continually had with my site is poor design. Although I’m good at writing content, getting links, and driving traffic, site design is a huge weakness for me. However good site design is essential. With poor site design people will look at your site and leave immediately. Your bounce rates will be huge.
Where can you get good themes?
While having a good theme is essential for your site, actually designing a theme can be very challenging. There is a lot to learn before you can design a good theme. You have to learn PHP, HTML, CSS etc. And many people started blogging to get away from having to run those aspects of your website. So if you don’t want to make your own theme, where can you get one?
1) Wordpress Theme Viewer - This is the default wordpress theme database. There are thousands of themes in here and many of them have been well designed and validated. This is a good first resource. Check it out and you could very well find something that is almost exactly what you are looking for.
2) Wordpress Theme Generator - Want to create your own theme? You can use this tool to configure different themes. Quickly and easily vary the colors to see what looks good. Change the spacings, where the sidebar is located to suit your needs.
3) Free Wordpress Themes - One of the myriad of sites you can get if you Google “Wordpress Themes”, this has a nice repository of different themes that you can check out.
But they don’t exactly fit my needs
Chances are, any theme you download isn’t going to be perfect. There is going to be something in it that you want to change. You may not like the colors, you may not like the spacing, or you may just want to put in a couple of different pictures. However starting from a free base theme and modifying it to suit your needs will be an order of magnitude easier than trying to create one yourself. The easiest thing to do is pick one that suits your needs format wise, and not worry about color. Changing the color of your site is much less difficult than changing the format. Get the format right first, then worry about the color.
I want my Page to Look Like That Site
Stealing someone else’s theme is as bad as stealing their content. But if you are just looking at a single aspect, like how did they get their picture to go to the right of the menu bar, you can dig into their code to see what they did.
The easiest way to dig into their code is to just download their page and examine it in a text editor or webpage creation tool. Internet explorer and Firefox allow you to easily download a webpage to your desktop. Presumably the other major browser do as well, but I don’t use them so I don’t know.
To download a page to your computer using IE 7 (IE 6 is very similar) Go to page, save as, and saves as a “Webpage Complete” This will allow you to view the CSS and HTML separately, as they will be in your site.
To save a page in Firefox go to File - Save Page As
on July 8th, 2007 at 7:56 pm
Thanks for the links! These will come in handy.
on July 9th, 2007 at 5:17 am
I agree that stealing a sites theme is as bad as stealing their content. But sometimes you do run across a site that has your same “free” design! Kinda like when you go to a party and someone has onthe same outfit!
Have you checked out John Cow dot Com? He ’stole’ his site from John Chow dot com, but only he could do something like that! And he has a $100 contest going on now too open to everyone. Real coool.
on July 9th, 2007 at 10:58 pm
John Cow is funny. It is a nice way for that blogger to make some quick bucks and play off of Chow’s popularity.
Doing that is less stealing than making a tribute site