What Do You Want From A Wordpress Theme?

Wordpress themes

As you may have noticed, I’ve changed my Wordpress theme during the holidays.

Not that I wasn’t happy with the old one any more. It worked perfectly and I was absolutely satisfied with it.

But I really wanted to get an answer to the question: “What do I want from a Wordpress theme?”.

I think one of the most obvious answers is that the design must be attractive.

Colors, as well as the number of columns are personal preference, but the design must be user friendly and easy to follow.

That’s why I have a navigation panel at the top, showing the most important links.

And I have my subscription options at the top of my right navigation pane. They all appear above the fold.

‘SEO-friendly’ is the second argument that comes to mind.

A lot of seo friendly features are incorporated in plugins, not in the design.

But if definitely wanted to show the title of each post in the top of the page, showing up as a H1 header.

Another thing I immediately get rid of are all the H2 headers in the sidebars if there still are any. They don’t serve any purpose.

Using the widgets sidebar makes the theme quite dynamic. Users can add what they want to just by clicking and dragging the widgets over to the sidebar. That makes search engine optimization a bit dependent on the widgets selected.

But apart from that, the sidebar is as SE optimized as can be.

I’m also very keen on avoiding duplicate content.

That’s why I always show the except in archives and categories and even do so on the front page in this theme.

And, I show the exact header information at the top of the page. Try it. Click on a category at the right and you’ll see it back in the header on top of the page.

Well, a few of my first thoughts about the topic, but the main question is:

What Do You Want From A Wordpress Theme?”

What are your thoughts?

Would you like to use this theme too?

What name would you give it?

Post them here as a comment.

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2008, January 9
Wordpress
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12 Responses to “What Do You Want From A Wordpress Theme?”

  1. Andrew says:

    I have asked the same question on myh blog and have had some interesting answers.

    SEO was one of the concerns, as was internalisation support, and built in support for 125/125 ad boxes.

  2. April says:

    I like a theme to be uncluttered but with enough space to put advertising. I also wish more themes were set up with SEO, subscribe to comments etc.

  3. Website Optimization - Terry Reeves says:

    I prefer blog themes that don’t actually look like a blog.

  4. Motivator says:

    For me colour does not matter… The first thing I notice is, that it has to be user friendly..

  5. On Living By Learning says:

    I haven’t found a WordPress theme that I love yet. I want simplicity and pizzaz. Of course I want SEO optimization. I also want colors that make my photos pop out, but I want an easy way to change the colors of various elements. I want it to be easy to change the sidebar boxes with ads, slideshows, etc. I want unlimited pages and sub-pages and a sitemap at the bottom. Mostly, I want a blog theme that includes options for customization that a dummy (like me) can figure out. Basically, I want the options that I had on Blogger with all the advantages available on the self-hosted WordPress.

  6. Karen (Karooch from Scraps of Mind) says:

    I like the new look Case.
    I’ve fiddled with themes on three occasions and each time it’s been a real headache. I asked my readers what they would like to see and of course got many and varied answers. It’s impossible to get something that pleases everyone. So now I please myself but try to keep things as clear as I can. I have a graphics heavy site so sometimes it can get a bit cluttered.

    I’d be interested to hear how you go with the header approach though.

  7. Raymond Chua says:

    Besides what you have stated above, I also want auto upgrade feature for desired wordpress version.

  8. Mark Dowling says:

    Hi Case,

    Looks good and for all the right reasons! :-)

    One thing about the H1 & H2 decisions. There’s some proof now that G likes Hx tags because of their intrinsic emphasis of text, not just because they are heading tags.

    Here’s an experiment: put together a post with some the text as custom H1, but formatted just like normal post text. You’ll find G doesn’t give it any extra weighting. But bold it or italicise it, and you have a winner!

  9. Mark Anastasi says:

    For me, what’s important is that you should have a user friendly blog. The colors should also be considered. And the most important, you should have a quality posts to get more readers.

  10. Case Stevens says:

    Thanks for your comments everyone :-)

    So, SEO, advertising and user friendly or great usability are main items I guess. As is flexibility for dummies?

    @April: Subscribe to comments is a plugin that you can install.

    @Karen: your site looks great.

    @Raymond: There’s an Wordpress Automatic Upgrade plugin that does this.

    @Mark D: nice, going to test that!

    @Mark A: quality posts are the core of the business!

  11. Raymond Chua says:

    Hey Case,

    Thanks for the recommendation. It looks great.

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