How to find a good WordPress theme for your business or corporate website

This is an important decision for several reasons:

• Your site’s appearance (“look and feel”) is determined by your theme.  A good theme will make the difference between a professional-looking site and one that isn’t.
• You should choose your theme fairly soon after you begin your site, since it does have an impact on how you create your content (i.e., two or three-column layouts, screen width, etc).  In WordPress, content is mostly separate from presentation, so you can always change your theme later. If you do this however you will lose most of the work that you have put into customizing your theme, so it is better to start right away with the theme that you will be ultimately using.
• Themes are customizable to differing degrees.  All themes can be customized by modifying the PHP theme files directly, but this can be technical and time-consuming.  You are better off choosing a theme that already has the functionality and the look that you want.  You are also typically better off choosing a Theme framework over  a regular theme. This is described further below. A theme framework allows you to customize options such as the presence or absence of side-bars directly through the theme options page.

Theme selection is more of an art than a science, but here is how I get my clients started:

1. Start with WordPress most popular (free) themes – you may find a “bull’s eye” theme there, and if not you might get some ideas.  Remember that there are disadvantages to using a regular theme vs. a theme framework, even if that theme is a “bull’s eye” from a visual point of view (see below).
3. Consider Artisteer ($50).  This is a Windows software that you can design the layout locally and has a lot of different options.  When you are done you export the theme files and upload to your site with FTP.  It creates visually rich sites, although a bit on the simple side.  Also works for Joomla and Drupal content-management systems (which is very cool).
4. However, recommendeded Theme frameworks:
   • Atahualpa (free, install from your WP Dashboard)
   • Thesis
   • iThemes Builder or Flexx
   • Studio Press

   These come up again and again.
   The reason a theme framework is recommended, is that most anything that you want to do later you will be able to do via customizing the theme options within your dashboard, rather than modifying the theme files in PHP.  Remember: you can do almost anything you want with WordPress – however it will be more or less work depending on whether your theme supports it (and/or whether you can find a plugin that supports it).
   Quality of support is also a serious concern.  In many cases paid themes provide better support.  The exception to this is Atahualpa (well-supported in the user forums).

5. Honorable mention (paid): WooThemes, iThemes Flexx, and ThemeForest themes (Themeforest is a large directory of themes priced from $3 and up).
6. Honorable mention (free): WhiteHouse, Hybrid, Thematic and Lysa.  These all install directly from your WP dashboard and have a clean uncluttered look
7. If you are going with Atahualpa, look for inspiration to the Atahualpa theme showcase and  Atahualpa showing off thread on the Bytes For All support forum.
8. Decide if you are going to need drop-down menus, since not all themes support them. If you have less than 10 pages on your site, do not use drop-down menus.
9. If you are looking for a theme for a specific business type, try searching the WordPress theme directory site or else Googling directly, ie, “WordPress theme for therapist”.

Uploading and installing a theme

If you purchase a commercial theme, you will need to upload it to your web site and activate it.  The easiest way to do this is via the Theme > Add New Theme command (in your WordPress dashboard), and then activate the “Upload” tab, and navigate to the theme zipfile provided by your theme vendor.  The second way to this is to unzip the theme and then upload it via FTP.  You ill need an FTP client software for this (I like Filezilla), and you will need to know your hosting account username and password.  See this article for additional instructions.

Tip: you don’t need a hosting account to play around with WordPress – try the local server installation method which takes 3 minutes.  Forget about WordPress.com – it doesn’t support the full range of themes and plugins (specifically Atahualpa).

How to customize (style) a theme

The first thing you will usually do is substitute your company banner and logo.  You can make yourself a banner using free image editing sofware Paint.Net.  You will need to upload your banner image to your website using FTP, and place it inside the correct directory of your server (normally ./wp-content/themes/yourthemename/images).

If your theme was generated with Artisteer: all your styling was done by the program, and so at this point you are done with your styling, and just need to setup your Widgets (see below).

Otherwise: check out your customizable theme options (in WordPress Admin > Appearance > Theme Options).  If you are using a theme framework, you will be able to set the width of your site and the presence / absence of side-bars.

The best themes and theme frameworks also give you control of the styling of every element of your site, such as background color, font, margins, etc.  You need to know a little CSS to do this, but this is quite simple and if in doubt you can Google “CSS background color” (or whatever) for the precise syntax, or to go to W3Schools CSS tutorial.

If you are styling your site CSS, there is a very cool software called Firebug, which is a Firefox addin that lets you examine each element of your site, view the underlying CSS code, and modify the CSS code on the fly and see the results.  You can use it, essentially, to copy the styling of any site on the internet (and it’s legal!).  You can find / detect color settings on another website using the Firefox Colorzilla plugin.  CSS normally needs the hex color code that looks like #AA0944 – this is hexadecimal notation, two hex digits each for the color values: Red, Green, Blue (00 to FF).

One you have styled your site to your desired look-and-feel, you need to setup your side-bars.

How to setup your side-bars with the Widget control

1. In your WordPress admin go to Appearance > Widgets
2. Select the left or right side-bar (on the far right of your screen)
3. Drag your choice of widget onto the side-bar and edit it / customize it.
4. Save your settings, then view your site

The most important widget to know is the “Text” widget, which lets you insert custom html text to your side-bar.  Use this, for example, to put your mailing list signup code in your side-bar, or put your contact information, or place Google ads or affiliate links.  It helps to know a little html, but if you don’t, don’t worry.  Just type your text and ask your designer or webmaster to format it, or else look at the underlying html from a site that you want to emulate (in most browsers do View > Page Source and then search for the text that you want to view the html for, or else use Firebug, put your cursor over the element, and then right-click.

Note that until you place at least one widget in your side-bar, most themes provide default settings that will decide what goes in your side-bars.  So, to take control of this, you need to place at least one widget.

Publishing images and videos to your WordPress site

The easiest way to publish images (with automatic resizing) and video to WordPress is with Windows Live Writer and is described in this article.

You can use Windows Live Writer also just to crop or resize images to your site.  Say for example you want to put some images in the sidebar.  You can’t use the WordPress built-in visual editor to edit sidebar html code.  Instead, try this in Windows Live Writer:

1. Write the text snippet and paste-in images your want
2. Publish to a temporary post
3. From your WP dashboard, edit your temporary post, enable the HTML view, select all and copy, delete the temporary article, and then paste the HTML into your sidebar widget area.

Mailing list management and WordPress

WordPress is a wonderful platform to create a mailing list (newsletter subcribe box) for your customers – and it can even be free.  Details in this article.