Written by Beth Downey
I’m often asked specific questions about and recommendations for WordPress themes.
“Which theme is best for a WordPress site?” or “What WordPress theme is best for my business in my industry?”
The short answer is, there is no one size fits all. Choosing a theme is a lot like choosing your next meal. You’ve got to eat something, but what will it be? There are a lot of choices and most of them will satisfy you. Do you eat fast food, fast casual, or homemade?
When you’re hungry and in a hurry, it’s not ideal to take time to cook a meal and sit down to eat. Most of us simply grab some fast food, often at the drive through, eat and get on with the day. A quick meal on the run satisfies our hunger and gets the job done. Pre-made WordPress themes with no customization work similarly; they give you a professional web presence with the investment of a little work.
There are times when we’re hungry, don’t have more than an hour, but still have time to sit down and eat a meal that can be a little more custom tailored to our tastes. This is similar to using a pre-made theme that has been customized a bit. Maybe you don’t like black beans on your Chipotle burrito. You want hot chicken, but you like to order different heat levels on each fried chicken tender. There are options. The same concept applies with not liking the colors on the theme purchased for your website; you can tweak a little code so the theme matches your branding. Add your logo, move some widgets around and viola! – your website looks like it was custom made for you.
Our best case scenario when seeking nourishment is the coveted home cooked meal. There’s nothing like a meal made of a carefully chosen menu, constructed with the freshest organic ingredients, slowly simmered on or baked in the stove and cooked with love. There’s a little of this, a dash of that and ample time to savor it all. Custom WordPress themes are the home cooked meal of the web, carefully crafted to have a special look, feel and functionality. They allow you the freedom to deviate from a recipe, to add a little of this and that spice, melding flavors to create a unique flavor to satisfy one’s appetite.
There are better ways to eat than others, and we all strive for the home cooked meal with time to savor, but sometimes we find ourselves in the drive through. And that’s ok. There are a lot of good pre-made ,off the shelf WordPress themes that can be purchased and work well out of the box. And given time and a bigger budget, a custom theme can be constructed to fit the unique needs of a website. It all depends on what you’re hungry for.