Once I’d got wordpress up and running I was desperate to personalize it with my own design and the book I was reading directed me to the wordpress free theme directory. Now don’t get me wrong there are some nice themes there but I found the directory hard to navigate and I just couldn’t find the kind of good quality wordpress theme I was looking for. I knew I couldn’t afford to pay a designer to design a wordpress theme for me and whilst I could learn how to design a wordpress theme myself, the learning curve was too step – I wanted to start blogging!
So a bit more research led me to premium wordpress themes, these are good quality wordpress themes designed by extremely talented folks who then make them available for the likes of you and me to download and customise. These are commercial wordpress themes so you do have to pay for them but at around $75 they’re well worth the money. The theme designers usually support their themes so if you get stuck you can get help which is invaluable for a beginner!
I started off by downloading a couple of templates from Elegant Themes where I paid a $20 subscription for the year, what great value for money, the designer has added two new themes since I joined two months ago! I found his support forum really useful and I did find the answer to a problem I was having. But for Laptop Millionaire I wanted a theme that was quite minimalist and had maximum search engine optimization potential. So I went looking for the best seo wordpress theme I could find and I found the Thesis theme by Chris Pearson.
The Thesis wordpress theme from DIYthemes is brilliant and it’s the one I’m using for Laptop Millionaire. It’s the best wordpress seo theme I’ve found – at $87 it’s one of the pricier themes but well worth every penny (or dollar). Follow this link to find out more about Thesis and the DIYthemes philosophy but what makes it the perfect theme for beginner bloggers is that is has an admin interface that integrates with your wordpress account so you can customize your blog without looking at any code. The code is accessible for more adventurous/experienced bloggers and I’ve found many good tutorials on how to further customise your Thesis theme.
There’s also an active and extensive support forum where you can get help with any problems you have and in fact I’ve been on there this morning! So first job today, go and find yourself a quality wordpress theme, download and install it then check back here tomorrow for part 4 of my How To Build A Blog series: 5 must-have Wordpress plug-ins
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