Your theme is really important. And choosing the right one was a little tricky for me. In fact, I wrote a post about it HERE.
But basically, if you want to get going right away without messing around with the look of your website, choose the theme that already looks and acts the way you want it to. Most are customizable to some degree, but that might involve coding. I don’t know about you, but I really didn’t want to mess with that.
So briefly, here are the things you want to keep in mind when choosing your theme.
- It’s a Premium theme – There are free themes out there, but a premium theme will have better support and is often better made. You get what you pay for in this case.
- It’s built on the Genesis framework – Genesis was explained to me as being the chassis of the car – holding all the nuts and bolts. And the theme itself as the body – the part that makes it look good. You want your theme to be built on Genesis so that WordPres updates are smoother, your site is more secure, you can change themes later without losing all your data, and much better performance overall. You often buy this separately from your theme.
- It looks the way you want – Seems obvious, but the fewer changes you need to make to anything, the better! There are about a zillion themes out there, so you’re sure to find something you can use right out of the box.
- It has the fonts you want – It’s not always easy to change the fonts. Check to make sure you like the choices.
- It has the layout you want – Most themes have a couple different styles.
- It has eCommerce capability – If you’re ever going to be selling anything in the future, you might consider getting a theme that’s got WooCommerce (or another eCommerce application) built in.
Here’s a good Bluehost article about choosing themes.