Choosing a Wordpress Theme: Part 1 – Premium, Custom, or Free?

Photo Credit: Eric Flexyourhead

Wordpress can be used to pull off just about any type of website these days, and clearly the magic of this platform lies in the vast proliferation of pre-designed themes, plug-ins, & widgets. Choosing a theme – which is the single largest determinant of a site’s look, feel, and organization – can be a confusing process. If you’re hacking together a site yourself, don’t overemphasis the way the theme looks – at least on the surface. After all, you can always tweak the basic feel of things, swapping out your own graphics, colors, and images with just a little hunting and pecking around the theme’s file structure and a few basic style-sheet tweaks. Far more important are the basic information architecture and functionality choices the theme designer made – because let’s face it – you’ll be locked into these unless you really know your way around the code. Most Wordpress theme choosing advice is focused on practical tips – e.g. Is it Widget Ready? But let’s step back and focus on the overall quality of the design, assuming we can tweak the little things we don’t like about it later. To help make sense of it all, I’m proposing a simple taxonomy of types of Wordpress themes to help with the decision-making process.

Premium, Custom, or Free?

First of all, there are many, many themes out there so we must give a nod to general quality level. Premium themes and are those that are for sale (vs. free) and tend to stretch the boundries of the wordpress form beyond the blog genre. These themes make it so that it’s basically harder "eBusiness" theme from Elegant Themes for someone to figure out that the site was built on wordpress, but still benefits from using wordpress as a content management system. Typical signs:

Freezing the loop into static home and landing pages
Avoiding typical signposts of the genre – like an “archives” or “blogroll” feature
Fancy Javascript – such as sliding menus
Fancy graphics with gradients
Targeted at business, small business, or “pros”

Premium themes have other advantages. Many themes come with custom page and post templates – something you almost never get with a free theme. They often have customization options that do not require monkeying around with the CSS & HTML files behind the scenes – so this can be an advantage depending on what you are trying to customize. However, I would encourage you not to be afraid to get into the theme’s files yourself and do basic customizations. It’s really not that difficult and it will make you a more powerful blogger (or ecommerce store operator,etc.) to have some basic familiarity here. Also, many plug-ins have easy-to-change settings and that is yet another way to customize your site without paying for a Premium theme. If you are truly hands off, you should consider a paid theme – but only after really evaluating what’s out there in terms of free options. StudioPress has beautifully designed themes for about $60. Of course, that’s much cheaper than hiring a graphic designer to do anything for you – but remember, that for this price you do not have exclusive rights to the theme. So if your goal is to look like your business paid for a custom site, this isn’t really the way to accomplish that.

Other arguments for paid themes is that they a) have better support, and b) have sounder code. The former may be true but that would vary highly depending on who is selling you the theme. Both Elegant Themes and Woo Themes offer annual subscriptions to an entire collection of themes. Given the frequency with which most WP based sites change themes, only developers who are building blogs and sites for others are likely to really benefit from access to a variety of themes under one roof – and while the ongoing support and ability to receive updates makes sense, does it justify an annual subscription? WooThemes service starts at $70 a year… that’s almost what you can get away paying for hosting these days. But you do get real value in terms of support here, including a knowledge base, tutorials and accurate, comprehensive documentation (Have you seen the typical ‘read me’ file that comes with your average free WP theme?)

As for soundness of code, I find it hard to believe such generalizations when there are literally 1000’s of free themes available from a wide variety of developers with different artistic talents, programming and skinning skills, and diverse motives for giving away themes in the first place. A quick glance through the smashing_top100 Smashing Magazine’s 100 Amazing Free Wordpress Themes for 2009 will quickly disprove the notion that free themes are of inferior quality when it comes to design and even coding skill of the theme developer. This is not the only comprehensive post on excellent themes at Smashing btw – this is the place to shop for themes in my opinion- and I prefer it to the more generalized catalogue at wordpress.org. Several online sites rate themes based on their effectiveness at getting results in search engines (SEO), which they accomplish by evaluating the code – but after typing a number of the Smashing top 100 into www.wpthemereview.com and getting no results we wonder if this is a true review site or if they are plugging their own themes. We’ll dismiss the notion of “Free Premium” here, which a lot of themes are marketed under. This is basically a bait and switch to get you to upgrade to one of the paid themes at the same outfit. And, of course, you can decide whether to use a custom theme – which is a theme that someone else builds specifically for you. This sort of violates the DIY spirit of Wordpress, don’t you think?

Listen. You’re either paying for a theme or you’re not. And if you ask me, the answer should usually be not. While paid themes were initially ahead on the innovation curve, particularly with non-bloggy layouts where WP is used for its content management capabilities and not as a blogging interface, the gap has closed significantly with what is now available for free. If you’re not afraid of a little hacking, it’s relatively easy to get a unique look, although be prepared for that crushing moment when you see another blog in your category with the same theme – as recently happened to me when I visited uxcamplondon.org. Another trend emerging are Wordpress frameworks – which are essentially pro themes that have special interfaces for modification and don’t require playing with the code. Read the RobbSutton post linked at the end of this one for more on frameworks.

And a recent clarification by the Software Freedom Law Center has confirmed that all Wordpress themes must be licensed under a General Public License (GPL) – except for the CSS and image files within the theme. It will be interesting to see how this affects the nascent pro theme industry. My recommendation – just find a free theme that is more or less close to what you want to do, and make a few changes yourself to optimize it to your needs. Because a little hacking skills will ultimately serve you in your blogging career. Alternatively, get your site designed custom using techniques that will shortly be available on this blog in the $5,000 Website category.

Solid State UX