While the content of a blog is definitely important, there’s a lot more that goes into starting a blog than merely the words you post for your readers. Without a beautiful, useful theme that’s supported by your CMS, your users can’t have a good experience with your product.
So much of the look and feel of your blog relies on the base theme you choose to showcase. And while you might want to go with a theme that immediately catches your eye, there are quite a few other considerations you should be aware of before deciding on a final theme. To help make this choice, here are three things you should consider when picking a theme for your blog’s CMS.
K.I.S.S.
WPBeginner.com shares that the best thing you could do to have a functional blog is keep your design, and therefore your theme choice, simple. While you might want to turn on all the bells and whistles in hopes of attracting more attention to your content and having a greater number of visitors to your blog, employing a theme that’s too busy or has too much going on is actually much more distracting for readers.
Instead, WPBeginner.com suggests trying to pick a theme that helps you accomplish all the goals you have set out for your blog—and nothing more. This should include making it easy for your visitors to navigate around your blog as well as keeping the process relatively simple, so you can spend more time creating quality content and less time trying to manage a complicated system.
Know What Functionality To Bring In Via Plugins
Along with picking a relatively simple theme for your blog, it’s important to note that this doesn’t mean you can’t have interesting or eye-catching functionality for some aspects. However, Joe of DesignWalls.com warns that this additional functionality is best brought to your blog through plugins rather than through the theme.
While you should pick a theme that allows you basic design functionality like sliders, additional fonts, and templates, by deciding to include any functionality above and beyond that through plugins, you give yourself the freedom to choose a theme from a much wider selection. This design strategy will also make it easier for you to make certain changes if they’re not hard-coded into the theme, which would increase the difficulty in getting the customization you want with a theme.
Themes and SEO
Regardless of how much SEO you plan to do with your blog, at least having a theme that is optimized for SEO will open up a lot of doors for you in this arena. Karol K., a contributor to ProBlogger.com, recommends getting a theme that has quite a few SEO features. In fact, she claims that the more SEO features a theme has, the better off you will be.
Some of the SEO features you should consider choosing include customizable title tags, meta descriptions, and H1s along with visible categories and tags. If you’re able to find a theme you love that has the added bonus of being optimized for SEO, it will make any of your future SEO efforts much easier for you to implement and manage.
The theme you choose for your blog’s CMS is going to give the whole design of your blog structure and purpose. With all this pressure, it’s important to choose wisely. Use the tips mentioned above to help you decide what features are going to be important to you in order to get the perfect look and feel for your blog.
