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The first step in the process of creating an effective WordPress theme is to understand what a theme is particularly in the context of WordPress. A theme can be defined as the collective of all elements that render the look and feel of a website or blog. This entails all the components (images, layout and styling) of the graphic interface.
There are many free themes for WordPress but beautiful and aesthetically pleasing premium themes come at a price. This makes the exercise of learning how to build effective WordPress themes a worthy endeavor.
Here are some principles to consider before you build your WordPress theme. You need to be able to answer these questions in order to build an effective WordPress theme;
• What is the primary purpose of your blog?
• What are your preferred look and feel preferences (layout styles and colors, etc)?
• What do you want to achieve with your theme?
Before you get to the flesh and bones of building a WordPress theme you need to consider the primary purpose of your blog. If you want to set up an e-commerce blog for example you need to design a theme that will captivate visitors while presenting your product/service calls to purchase in an effective and non obstructive way. If on the other end you want to set up a blog for content publishing then you will make different styling and layout decisions for your WordPress theme. The most important considerable in developing a WordPress theme is the primary purpose of your blog. The theme determines where various components of the site are positioned and how they are laid out. The key objective of building a theme is to give optimal prominence to the most important components of the website or blog such as sign up forms, “Buy Now” calls to action, text, images, videos etc.
Make sure the theme is Search Engine Optimized
In designing your WordPress theme you need to take into cognizance that success in the web is not just about setting up an impressive website. A powerful WordPress blog with a premium theme will not yield much if there is no traffic coming to it. To ensure that there is profitable organic traffic coming to your blog you need to ensure that your theme is search engine optimized. The theme should have features and provisions for meta tags, headings and properly titled “alt” tags for images. The entire theme must be simple and user friendly enough to ensure content visibility to search engines. Once you have nailed it on template design other SEO strategies will be easy to implement.
Why invest in a WP theme
As mentioned earlier success online requires a collective of well thought out efforts. Competition in the cyber landscape is very stiff and users have a very short attention span. This means that every means with which website visitors can be reached must be optimized for effective engagement. This is why you should invest in a WordPress theme. If the theme of your blog is dull and lackluster your web pages will experience a high bounce rate. A high bounce rate means that many visitors come to your website and leave the moment they arrive because there is nothing to get and retain their attention. While developing your own WordPress theme make sure you develop a captivating ad non cluttered design that can retain your visitors with the prospect of converting their activity into sales or responses to whatever calls to action you have placed on your pages.
Installing your WordPress Theme
Once your WordPress theme has been completed you have two options of uploading your theme to your WordPress blog. The first option is to us your WP admin portal to install the new theme following the install theme feature under the admin control panel. The second method involves uploading the template files manually through file transfer protocol (FTP). Having done this you still need to login to your WP admin and set your preferred theme as the default theme under the appearances settings. Follow these and other tips to ensure you get your WordPress theme building right from the word go.
Author Bio:
Kimo Rawlins is an expert in the web hosting niche for over 8 years, his goal is to share as much information and educate all his readers. if you are new to the hosting industry i highly recommend that you read his blog at http://www.web-hosting-reviews.info
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