The focus of your blog isn't your theme, it's your user and the content is centered around him. The presentation is crucial though - it can't be ignored.
I am not talking about colors and design. Think of a theme as a structure to put everything in. A bag to store your website's content. It's the car to drive your curated content in. Whether you want a Hatchback or a Sedan - that decision is yours to make.
And it's not necessary you will always select the theme with most features - you need to know the needs of your blog to select the right theme suitable for you. The traffic of your blog and how actively you update it is what decides everything.
So today, we are looking at what features should a good theme have. We will describe what each of those features which you see on the marketing pages actually mean. We will also see what benefits it provides or the repercussions of not having this feature in a theme. This will help answer many of the questions which a rookie might have. Finally, we will introduce you to some of the most popular themes (on MyThemeShop) with their features and benefits.
Things to look for in a Theme
In this section, we will be looking at a list of essential features.
a. Responsive Design: A website can be accessed from a variety of screen sizes - from smartphones, tablets, or bigger monitors. Your website must scale automatically otherwise else broken user experience will drive visitors (potential customers) away.
If your theme does that job of scaling the display automatically for different display sizes, then it is a fully responsive theme. Then you need not worry about maintaining different websites specific to each site. No extra code, no additional resources to maintain - your theme does everything!
- Social Sharing: Few of your website's visitors will come back repeatedly or through google search. When billions of people today consume social media, it makes sense to concentrate your marketing efforts on these platforms.
If your themes have social sharing buttons built-in, you are increasing your reach - automatically, without any additional or heavy plugins.
- Several Page Styles Built In The Theme: Some webmasters prefer sidebar on the left or right. Different pages might need different layouts too. An about us page, testimonials page, portfolio page - are all some basic page layouts needed by all the websites. Besides the basic layouts, check some extra layouts and cool effects the theme may offer. A good theme will provide layouts for multiple page types. But you might not need all of them. Don't go for the flashiness - go for the usability!
d. Support and Updates: Post-sales support is what differentiates a good company from others. Most free themes provide basic support but paid themes also provide advanced support forums. These technical support forums have active participation by the developers of the theme, who will help you to solve errors. You can also request features for the theme, and chat with their developers.
e. SEO Optimized Code: This is another of the essential feature. Your theme should follow SEO guidelines and have great loading time. These are the factors used by Google to evaluate how user-friendly the site is. Besides, a fast loading website can be great if you want to deliver advanced and complex user-experience features.
