In this article, we’ll try to lay out a series of points to keep in mind when choosing a good theme to start building a website, depending on the profile (developer, designer, or content creator) and the type of project.
The first step is to introduce the world of WordPress themes: a theme is the visual presentation we give to our website’s content. We can think of a website built with WordPress (or with any content management system, really) as having three clearly distinct parts:
- On one hand, there’s the data structure — this part requires analysis and environment preparation so the website has a consistent structure.
- The content we add to the website.
- The design and the way we present everything above.
This last part is what we’ll cover in this article, through making a good choice of theme for our website.
From a web developer’s point of view, it’s very common to receive a complete design from a designer or an agency, which then has to be turned into a functional website. For this job, the theme itself usually matters little, since all the design work is already done — a “blank” starter theme is typically used as the base to build everything else on. Examples of this type of theme include: Bones, Roots, or Underscores.
A designer may choose to base their work on a premium template (Themeforest, woothemes, elegantthemes), which offer good value for money and, in certain specific cases, can make the design work easier.
Some points to keep in mind when choosing a good theme to use as the base for a website:
- A good design, of course.
- Check that it has good documentation, so it can help us if we have questions about how some aspect of the theme works.
- That the developer offers support — that way, if problems arise with the code, the theme’s creator can help us resolve them.
- That it’s reasonably priced — there’s a wide range, but a price between €50-100 is more than reasonable.
- That it’s designed for our website’s specific topic — there are templates built for different types of sites: online stores, corporate websites, etc. It’s ideal to choose one that fits properly with the website we’re going to build.
Once we’ve chosen the overall look we want our website to have, what remains is the process of preparing the structure, adding and adapting all the content and images, and adapting the theme to fit our needs and our brand’s design. temporal domain .