In my last post I told the importance of enjoying + writing. I hope you found it useful and followed and will continue following the tips.

When you choose a theme, you should bconsider different factors like the content of your blog, the audience, and the meaning of the colors used. For example, you may see http://www.problogger.net or you can see my site itself. They are simple and elegant. They also serve their content in a formal and concise way so that it’s a pleasant experience for all to visit them.

These are just the examples. You need not be a colour specialist to choose themes for your blog site. But there are some important factors that are to be considered while choosing a theme for your blog site.

Some of these factors are:

• Content Of Your Blog
• Search Field / Box
• Place For Links (Blogroll), RSS Buttons & Other Buttons
• Archives Pages
• Trackbacks Links, Comments Links & Easy Navigation
• Check Your Theme Properly
• Audience Of Your Blog
• Colours Choice
• Fonts Choice
• Theme Size
• Check Theme Compatibility
• Check Your Themes On Regular Basis

Content Of Your Blog

It is a wise saying that “Content is the king”. Whatever your blog is about, content is at the heart of it. How beautiful the look of your blog may be, but there are no benefits from such a good looking blog until there are some good posts or articles in it.

While choosing your theme, please keep a sharp watch on the subject of your content and whether the theme represents all the content that you want to show. There are some themes that do not support “static pages”. Static pages are the pages like about page, contact page, etc.  When you want to tell something that does not fall under a specific blog category, for example, about you or about your works and projects, that content is considered as static content.

Content of this type is represented in separate pages. So when you plan to display static pages, your theme must be capable of showing them. Otherwise, you will keep on adding pages through the WordPress administration panel and they will never be displayed. Mostly now a days all themes support static pages. But if you take some old themes, they won’t support static pages.

You should also choose a theme for your blog based on your blog topic. If you own a technology blog, use photos of computers, mobiles, etc. If you have a pet blog, use dogs, cats, fishes, etc. Never mix the two topics. Suppose if you have a technology blog, do not use photos of animals in it. It simply looks bad. It shows a confused nature of yours.

Search Field / Box

Another important part of a theme is a “Search” field / box. In this textbox, users can search for some specific keywords in your blog. Not all themes support searching. So please consider this option while choosing a theme, if you need a search button. Search button is must for every blog. It allows users and visitors of your blog to search your blog to find what they really want. Without a search box, it is difficult to give content to your users and visitors.

Place For Links (Blogroll), RSS Buttons & Other Buttons

In themes, there must be an available place where you can add your favorite links or blogrolls. Themes must also support an RSS button, both in RSS and Atom format. There should also be buttons of social bookmarking below your posts. This is not an important factor to that extent. It’s ok if you give this low priority. If this is not there in your theme you can simply use some sorts of plugins in your blog.

Archives Pages

A typical theme must support archives where your blog posts are categorized by the date of posting. In WordPress themes, you can display your blog posts categorized by month, week, or date. These categories are called archives. Another important thing that themes should support is the display of available categories to which the posts belong. If a user can see the available category list, it will be easier for him or her to sort out what he or she is looking for.

Trackbacks Links, Comments Links & Easy Navigation

In every post, a theme must supply a link for trackbacking that post. There must be a place where you can comment on every post.

Themes should also support pagination, which means having a navigation system to go to the previous and next pages. Usually in a WordPress blog, ten posts are shown in each page. So if you want to see previous posts, there must be a way to navigate through them. In the sidebar, many themes can display the latest posts and latest comments. Whenever a single post is displayed, a list of the relevant posts is also displayed in some of these themes.

Check Your Theme Properly

Another very important issue is that some themes come with an inbuilt horizontal menu or vertical menu. Some of these themes are fine, since they use original contents of your WordPress blog posts, pages, and other stuff to create these dynamic menus. However, most surprisingly many themes come with some sticky content. For example, in some themes there is an option “About the Company” in the horizontal or vertical menu and when someone clicks on it, it redirects to a page that you can never create via the admin panel, or you can supply the contents for those pages. Moreover, it is totally irrelevant for an individual blogger to have a default link “About the Company” in his or her blog. To remove those default menus, you have to modify themes manually and for this programming as well as HTML knowledge is required, which regular, non-tech bloggers may not have.

So while choosing themes keep your eyes on these factors and judge whether each theme can really represent your content. Besides, keep in mind that people like simplicity. So if your readers are corporate users, try to be simple and precise.

Audience Of Your Blog

Although there is no strict rule for choosing themes according to the article type, but if you look around, you may see that the appearance of a theme should match with the age of your audience, their mood, and their style. When you are writing for kids, you should choose something funny or colorful. When you are writing for travelers, your theme color should be green or blue, i.e. the color of nature. Travelers are always colorful, so try to use some bright and shiny themes. If your readers are corporate users, try to be precise while choosing these themes. Use your intelligence while choosing a theme according to the audience.

Colours Choice

Colors are also a very important thing when you consider the mood of your audience, and of course they are also relevant to the content of your blog.

Colors can give a very pleasant experience to your user, if you choose them correctly. Be very careful while mixing up different colors, especially for typeface. A very good color for the font may look very odd if the background color doesn’t match with it. The colors that you choose for your blog will also determine the readability of your content. Nevertheless, have fun with colors. Choose a sober colour. Try using a light colour. Never use dark colours like dark blue, black, etc. It simply puts strain on eyes of the readers and they get tired soon.

Fonts Choice

Font is another issue to consider while choosing themes. Some fancy themes may use a lot of font faces in a theme, but that really degrades the user experience. Whether it’s your own theme or a third-party one, try to use the minimum number of fonts. As far as possible, stay with only one font (Size may vary for different sections, like header, footer, etc.) or at the maximum two.

There are some sites that really care about accessibility issues. Some plug-ins are available for switching between font sizes. For example, not all people may feel good with the same font size; these plug-ins give them the facility to increase the font size at run time. With help of these people can change the font’s size of your blog on the go. And people with low visibility and people with less powerful eyes or who can read only big text might find it easy to read your blog.

Theme Size

Many of these themes use graphical content. Some of them style their appearance using just CSS, some use both CSS and Images. If you look around some very popular themes like Green Marine, Almost Spring, or Blix, you will notice that they do the styling entirely using CSS; so they are small in size. Connection, another popular theme, uses a banner that is also very small in size. So you must make sure that your theme is small in size, and easy to load for users having slow Internet connections. If you use high-speed home broadband connections, size doesn’t matter for you.

However, the fact is that you are not writing a blog for yourself. There will be readers from around the world where high‑speed Internet connection is too costly and they depend on dial-up or slow connections. So if your blog takes minutes after minutes to load, the chance is that the viewer will not feel comfortable and will be unlikely to come back to read it. Choose a theme that is decent, easy to navigate, easy to load, and most importantly comfortable to read through.

Check Theme Compatibility

Always check the theme you choose are compatible with different browsers like Firefox, Internet Explorer, Safari, Chrome, Etc. Always make sure that the theme is compatible with these browsers. If not all, make sure theme is compatible with Internet Explorer and Firefox.

Check Your Themes On Regular Basis

Always check the different pages of your blog, like static pages, posts pages, archives pages, search pages, and many other different pages of your blog. Atleast check them once a week or a month. Always review the code of your theme once a week or once in a month.

It happens some times that your theme gets broken because of some wrong codes. So check it regularly.