wordpress themes Archives

Thank heavens for WordPress! This millennium’s most celebrated content management platform and plugin supplier has been making the lives of bloggers, content marketers and web developers easier for quite some time now.

The WP interface is not only easy to navigate but it also lets you install SEO plugins to help you track your site’s rankings and search results performance as well as assess whether your website complies with or falls short of SEO standards.

WordPress powers nearly 30 per cent of the World Wide Web as per recent data. The WP content management software is so convenient that it currently registers close to 200 million downloads across the globe.

A number of big name brands like IBM, Samsung, Sony, CNN, Walt Disney and MTV use a WP interface to develop and manage their websites.

There are hundreds and thousands of WP themes, downloaded more than 100 million times, with 2 million theme switches occurring each month.

3,000 of these themes are under a GNU General Public License and can be downloaded for free on the WP Theme Directory, while premium themes for blogs and websites of any niche are available for download on various theme shops or marketplaces.

Businesses often change their website’s appearance to better reach out to target customers. With so many themes populating the web, choosing the best one to redesign your website is sometimes a tall order.

Everyone hails content as king but the truth is how your website looks and feels is just as important. Visual appeal gives content some extra oomph so that your target consumers and readers get a holistic experience of what it’s like to do business with you.

If you are having trouble finding the right WordPress theme for redesigning your website, these tips might come in handy:

Best Tips for Finding a New WordPress Theme

1. Identify What Doesn’t Work

Think about the reasons why your website theme must be changed. Is your current theme not working? Are you getting negative customer feedback regarding your website’s appearance or functionality?

Whatever your reasons for changing your WP theme, list them down one by one especially issues raised by customers and people navigating your site.

After completing your list, provide a corresponding solution for each item. Use these solutions to help you find the best WP theme. Your new theme must not repeat the pitfalls of the old one.

2. Get a Theme That Addresses Your Business Needs

As a business owner, you know your business better than anyone else. Does your website allow you to communicate the right message to your target markets? For instance, you have an online store that sells dresses online.

In your line of business, the ideal theme should have an e-commerce interface to better showcase your products and facilitate online shopping. Your chosen theme must provide your website utmost functionality .

3. Priorities SEO

72 per cent of marketers say that SEO is effective for marketing their products and services online. If your business is looking to earn consistent traffic and rank well on search engine results, choosing a SEO friendly theme is crucial.

Themes designed for SEO allow you to control your content, optimise targeted keywords, add quality images, install SEO plugins and tweak on-page elements to increase SEO performance.

4. Pick a Responsive WordPress Theme

Remember that your individuals, regardless of demographics, will use different browsers and any type of device to search or access a website.

To make your site thoroughly accessible to as many target users as possible, install a responsive theme. Despite a few layout versions, a responsive theme loads well on desktop, mobile and tablet without altering the original content or important markups.

This type of theme retains the appearance of your site when accessed through major browsers like Chrome, Opera and Mozilla.

5. Use the Right Colours

Colour selection and arrangement give your website that extra edge. Having the right colours in place helps you present your website in the most appropriate way to target markets and solicit reactions from them. They create the kind of vibe your business needs to attract customers.

Some colours are more effective in specific industries. University and corporate websites, for instance, use minimal colours – mostly neutral or darker tones.

This is because colours can represent anything from your company values to your brand image. So put a lot of thought into choosing theme colours and build your brand from there.

6. Choose Your Plugins

When redesigning your website, create a checklist of WP plugins you want to use. Be discerning when it comes to choosing plugins.

Some plugins like Yoast SEO and Jetpack are useful particularly for digital marketers and SEO specialists. Others only take up space and increase your site’s load time.

Please also note that if you install a free theme, some plugins may not be available for download. You might want to upgrade to premium WP membership or buy a premium theme from legitimate theme stores.

7. Check Your Web Design Budget

You’re redesigning your website because you want to attract more customers. But how much are you willing to spend for your new design? Web redesigning costs anywhere between $1,500 and $15,000 or more depending on how much redesigning is needed.

WordPress and a number of theme shops and directories offer both free and paid themes. Free themes are good if you’re operating your campaign on a small budget but website functionality and access to plugins will be limited, which might slow down your marketing efforts.

Premium WordPress themes are highly recommended for better results but make sure you have the budget for them.

The Best Theme for Your Online Marketing

Unless you are willing to invest time and resources in web redesigning, not all themes will give your online marketing that much needed boost.

If there is a need to install a new WordPress theme, however, choose one that can best represent your business as well as support various aspects of your online marketing. If in doubt, you certainly have the option to tap the expertise of companies specialising in web designing services.

About Author

Lauren Mclaren is a technical writer with SEO experience. She works with Digital Muscle, a premier provider of Affordable web design packages and Best SEO services in Sydney. If you are looking for the best SEO company in Sydney, Digital Muscle can provide you with the right strategies to help your business grow.

WordPress is one of the most popular and innovative website publishing platforms available out there with 409 million people viewing more than 15.5 billion pages per month.

The application is intuitive and user-friendly which allows users without any technical background to easily set up a website according to their style preference within minutes. While there are many challenges when it comes to creating a WordPress website, coding shouldn’t be one of them.

Some of the best websites nowadays are run by WordPress and it powers approximately 28% of the internet. WordPress is used all over the world and is trusted by major entities such as the U.S Government, NASA, CNN, Tedx, Samsung, Coca-Cola, Harvard University and more. The WordPress community is huge with users making 41.7 million new posts and 60.5 million new comments each month.

Even giant corporations such as Yahoo, eBay, Equifax, Target and more all suffered data breaches in our recent memory. Depending on the size of your business, these security risks could be damaging towards the reputation of your company.

As a result, it’s important to keep your data safe through encryption and by enhanced security measures. If you have a WordPress websites, you will most likely need to keep your WordPress theme and plugin up to date to eliminate the latest digital threats towards your company.

Some Quick Facts About WordPress

WordPress is open source and free for anyone to use. WordPress was created back in 2001 and is older than Twitter and Facebook. Understand that there is a difference between WordPress.org and WordPress.com.

The open source platform includes WordPress.org which allows you to build your website for free; however, it is recommended that you choose the top hosting services in order to benefit from maximum security. Hosting services through HostGator or Bluehost are quite popular for WordPress websites.

WordPress.com which is the hosted version of the open source software can be easily set up without requirements of external hosting services. You can pick either options to get your website started; however, WordPress.com could be less challenging and time consuming for a small business or solo entrepreneur.

There are countless available themes and over 50,000 free plugins to choose from. No matter what version of WordPress you choose, the backend functionality is quite similar; therefore, if you decide to switch between different versions of WordPress you can do so at any time without losing your content.

Choosing the Right Theme

Since there are so many themes out there to choose from, it’s often difficult to choose the right design let alone consider security features.

One of the most painstaking and crucial steps in creating a WordPress website is choosing the right theme because it’s the embodiment of your brand identity and give people impressions about your company. It could take forever to choose the right colors, fonts, templates, navigations, plugins and more.

While it’s important to think about colorful options, styles, user experience and even SEO strategy for your website, security is also imperative and something that most businesses don’t think about.

Since WordPress is an open source platform, many themes while beautifully designed might not be safe to use.

By choosing a secure WordPress theme and plugin, you can spend less time worrying about security breaches and malfunctions within your website. With a little more free time, you can focus on improving your marketing strategy and content creation.

Stay Secure

According to statistics, 73.2% of WordPress installations are vulnerable to hacker attacks and can be detected through free automated tools or simply by updating to the latest versions. Since your website is an extension of your brand and houses all of your company’s crucial information, it’s important to take time and protect it.

As a company, you should maintain high standards and follow strict protocols to protect your data. In the digital era, not only your company’s details are at risk but your customers’ private information as well.

Doing business online can be risky and stressful; therefore, it’s crucial to ensure the security of your site, themes, and plugins.

Making It A Habit To Update Regularly

In the open source WordPress community, anyone can design themes and develop plugins. Some of these products are free and some of these themes could cost you a hefty price.

While some web developers update their themes and plugins on a regular basis, others don’t for months, years or even at all. Running an older version of WordPress can put your websites at risk.

A research which surveyed 42,106 WordPress websites found in Alexa’s top 1 million found that 30.95% of them are still running an older version of WordPress which is version 3.6.

While updating your themes and plugins frequently could be a pain, it shouldn’t take much time at all. The ways that themes and plugins are integrated WordPress allow you to quickly install updates without disturbing your workflow.

You can complete other tasks without having to wait for your downloads. In addition, most hosting services have auto updates to continuously protect your website against the latest threats.

Whether it’s manual or automatic, make sure that you update your website often to ensure that you are protected against bugs and malware.

Follow these simple steps to ensure that your WordPress site is protected so you can focus more on creating engaging content and worry less about security risks.

By updating regularly, you can have a faster loading speed, be protected against the threat of hackers, have a new innovative design, access to the latest competitive tools and allow your website to work at full capacity.

With WordPress built-in update system, you can have access towards minor updates as well as major updates if there is a common severe vulnerability amongst other websites on the internet. So there is really no excuse not to update and make your website security your number one priority.

A Collection Of Responsive Free WordPress Themes

Tag Archives: wordpress themes

7 Tips for Finding a New WordPress Theme for Redesigning