SEO

I’ve discussed these criteria in a previous post, but it’s worth going through them again here as they apply to Thesis.  First off is SEO.  SEO is tricky for a few reasons. 1) No one really knows Google’s algorithm except for Google.  Meticulous testing has revealed many of the details, but it’s a stab in the dark or a good guess in many cases.  2) SEO and design don’t always agree with each other.  Designers want to make things look good to humans and SEO experts want to make things look good to the search engines. Both are necessary and there’s a trade off involved.  3) SEO is a moving target.  Google and other search engines are constantly making adjustments to their methods and so to maintain rankings and search engine position requires continual vigilance.

In terms of SEO, Thesis has a few advantages. The core development effort is aware of SEO best practices and has made it a focus from the beginning to balance SEO with good design. The large install base for the theme and the caliber of the blogs that use Thesis provide feedback to the developers which improve the core even further.  Finally, the proper use of css and XHTML (standards compliant) ensure that automated bots (from the search engines) can find the keyword information you include in your posts easily.

Speed

One of the most significant factors in the success of WordPress as blogging software has been the theme and plugin architecture.  You don’t have to be a programmer to understand how appealing it is to be able to modify a WordPress blog without having to do a lot of programming.  One problem that comes with this flexibility is that there are a lot of poorly written themes and plugins.  Each task that you want your theme or plugin to do requires processing, which can potentially slow down your website.

Here again, Thesis does an amazing job because it was a focus from the beginning.  The core development effort is aware of how WordPress is supposed to work and they have made very deliberate choices to make the theme as fast as possible.  This has two outcomes.  First is that visitors to the site have a better experience.  Research has shown that faster sites get more clicks.  People are more willing to explore the site when each page loads quickly. The second is that you can accommodate more visitors to your site without performance degrading.  I suppose a third would be that Google has just announced that the load time of a website is now a factor in ranking, which means that a fast theme brings SEO benefit too.

Usability

When a user comes to your site, they want to find the information that’s most relevant to what they’re looking for.  The Thesis team has found a great balance between design and SEO that gives the user a very clear path to the information that’s of greatest interest to them.  In addition to good design, they fully support the customizable widgets that are built in to WordPress.  This gives you ultimate flexibility when tweaking your site to increase conversions.

Productivity

Finally, the breadth and quality of the customization options available in Thesis means that you don’t have to fight with your blog or know how to code to get the results you want.  You’re productive from the first moment using nothing more than your web browser to configure your site.  This may be the most immediate benefit to using Thesis.  You get to stop thinking about how to do this or that and instead focus on your content.  Thesis gets out of your way and helps you do what you do best.

My sites run Thesis

I’m a big fan of Thesis and use it for my own websites.  In fact, my first blog ever runs Thesis.  Have a look at these links for a couple of examples:

• Exercise Log Blog
• Choice Software Zone

To see even more examples of how to use Thesis and see some great videos about how to use it, head over to the official site:

Atahualpa

The Atahualpa theme is a mature theme (meaning it’s been under development for a long time) and provides a lot of user configurable options.  Perhaps best of all for non-tech folks is that there are a lot of template type items so that you don’t have to provide your own information.  For example, there are a collection of favicons to choose from without having to create and upload one.  Favicons are the little icon that shows up in your browser tab and they can add some polish to a website.

My first thirty day challenge website used this theme and as I went through the motions I was easily able to take top page listing in Google for a competitive keyword in  just a few weeks, so at least there wasn’t anything glaringly wrong with the theme from Google’s perspective.  I doubt it’s as optimized as something like the Thesis theme, but it can get you down the road quite nicely if you’re on a short budget.

UPDATE: I’ve recently had some trouble with this theme in Internet Explorer.  That’s a pretty bad thing since Microsoft still holds a significant lead over the competition in user base.  If you plan to use this one make sure your finished site looks OK in IE.

Arjuna X

The Arjuna X theme has also been around for a while and has a very polished look.  In fact, it may be the most attractive of the three themes I’m featuring here and would be a great choice for a personal blog.  Customization includes headers, sidebar placement and well defined widgets.  It’s easy to use and gives your blog a clean, authoritative look.

Arthemia

The Arthemia theme is a free theme, but it’s a sibling of a more robust premium theme by the same name.  That means that in some ways you benefit from the commercial development on the premium theme, even if you don’t get all the bells and whistles.  This theme is also the only one of the three that fits in the category of a magazine theme.

Out of the box this theme offers several well defined areas for widgets that look great, but it has no user options on the backend.  That means that any customization will have to be done in the editor and so it’s not a good choice for a non-tech person.

Caution: you get what you pay for

I know that the free themes are appealing because they don’t cost a thing.  If you’re starting out with very little (or no) budget then these three themes give you options that are probably just right.  On the other hand, the SEO characteristics of these themes and customization for branding or conversion may not be as good as the premium themes.

In my experience, I found that I wasted a lot of hours trying to tweak the free themes to meet my needs.  In the end I wasn’t ever quite satisfied, since they don’t have the same polish and purpose that the premium themes do.  If I have to spend two hours getting a free theme to do what I want it to, then I’m probably better off just paying for a premium theme that does it out of the box (like Thesis).

If you have a favorite free WordPress theme, post a link to it in the comments below.

• Logic
• Design
• Content

A theme has very little (ideally nothing) to do with the logic or programming of your blog. A theme serves to frame the content that you put on your website, but it is not the content.

Design is the sole focus of theme development and WordPress has made if very easy for non-technical designers to create a new theme quickly. That can be both good and bad. The bad comes in the form of poorly written themes that don’t perform well in SEO and website load time.

The HTML bummer

You only have to look back on the first websites ever built to begin to appreciate the power of themes for websites. Creating websites out of HTML, JavaScript and CSS was a major bummer. Why?

Imagine you have a website with hundreds or thousands of pages and you wanted to change how the header looked, but the content would remain the same.  This shouldn’t seem too far fetched. It would be like painting your house or putting a new sign up in the window of your business. Everything stays the same inside, but the ‘theme’ changed. With the original HTML approach to creating websites, you would have to hand modify every single page and try to keep them consistent with one another.

WordPress makes this type of change easy and very fast. To help it all make a little more sense I made this video for you.

Cell phone faceplates

Blogs aren’t the first place to use the idea of a theme. For example, cell phone manufacturers have been doing the same thing with their phones for years. Just like this Superman Cell Phone Faceplate. It doesn’t change which contacts are in your phone or your caller ID history. It just changes the way it looks to everyone. It’s the same story with a WordPress theme.

Other considerations

As you think about what theme to choose for your blog, you want to look deeper than just how it looks. The fact is that the theme can have a very significant impact on where the search engines place you in search results. It can also affect how visitors interact with your site.

SEO Friendly

One big factor in choosing the right theme in WordPress comes back to Search Engine Optimization. While the content may not change, the theme can make it easier or harder for the search engines to find the content on the finished page. That means the your theme can have a big impact on your search engine ranking. This tends to be a big differentiator between free and premium WordPress themes.

Easy to customize and tweak

Since most people aren’t programmers (and don’t really care to be), the best themes offer a range of customizations and tweaks that the blog owner can do without needing to write any ‘code’. These are browser based tools that you can use from your WordPress dashboard. The more control you have without needing to modify the theme code the better.

Visitor experience

The experience a visitor has when he arrives at your site is influenced by two theme related characteristics. The first is speed, or load time. The second is ease of navigation.

In the first place, if the pages take too long to load, then the user is very likely to bounce off your site. To ‘bounce’ means that they clicked through to your site and then immediately left. You want to make sure you choose a theme that will load quickly.

Ease of navigation is very relative. It’s relative to the content, your conversion goals, the visitor expectations and even the visitor state of mind. There aren’t really any general rules here, but there are some guidelines, like this post about one page, one job. As you choose a theme, think about what your visitors are expecting, where they’re coming from and what your end game goal is. This will help you choose the right theme.

Now you can see that themes make it easy to change the way your website looks. In my next few posts on WordPress themes I’ll tell you which free and premium themes I like best and why.