You’ve finally decided to take the plunge and start a new blog. Congratulations! Now that you have purchased hosting and installed WordPress, it’s time to choose a theme. Choosing a theme can seem overwhelming at first, because there are so many different options on the market. Don’t worry. To help you out, we have put together the 4 most important things to consider when choosing a theme. When you follow these 4 tips, you will be able to steadily increase your readership and get the most out of your blog.
High Readability
The first thing to consider when choosing a theme is to make sure it allows for high readability. After all, the number one reason people will visit your blog is to consume your content, right? That means you should choose a blog with a font that is both consistent and easy on the eyes. No matter how cute you might think a font is, if it’s hard to read, then skip that theme.
Here are some of the top tips to increase the readability of your blog:
- Fonts. Pick a theme with only one or two fonts that are easy to read, and don’t use any other fonts. Arial, Courier, Verdana, and Times New Roman are always safe fonts to use.
- Whitespace. Make sure the theme you choose allows plenty of whitespace. Design, text, and pictures can go a long way, but only if there is plenty of whitespace in between in order to give your reader’s eyes a break.
- Spacing. One of the easiest ways to make your blog readable is to use line spacing to your advantage. Make sure you double space your paragraphs rather than indent.
Customization
One of the best things about a theme is that you don’t have to do much work to make it look good. While it’s nice to have someone talented design your blog theme for you, it’s also nice to have some options to customize. This can include customizing the color of your blog, the header image, and even the code (if you know what you are doing). The more options you have for customization, the more opportunities you have to really make the blog your own.
Mobile Design
With more than 1.7 million people searching the internet from mobile devices, having a blog that is not optimized for mobile is no longer an option. That is, unless you want to turn away a large portion of visitors to your blog. When you select a theme, double check to make sure that it is optimized for both desktop and mobile viewing.
Compatible with WordPress Update
There are a lot of places to buy themes for WordPress, but one thing you will want to check out before purchasing a third-party design is that your theme is guaranteed to update along with WordPress. It’s highly possible to buy a good-looking third-party theme only to find out with the next WordPress update that your theme doesn’t account for the WordPress changes.
For this reason, we often recommend purchasing a theme from a company like StudioPress or the Mojo Marketplace.