What are your esthetics needs?
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First and foremost you have to make sure the theme matches the look and feel you want and need. I used to think you could morph a premium theme into what you want with just a little tweaking. I’ve realized that is not so easy.
We have four professional graphic designers that create the design for our custom and stock themes. They’re professionals and they see the world in a different way than everyone else. They keep things cohesive and beautiful. When an average person starts to hack the theme and move things around, the beauty starts to be degraded and the theme loses the original intent.
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When selecting a theme, know that you can tweak colors and some other things but that a major overhaul (particularly layout) is best left to a design professional. Take the time to find a theme that meets 80% of your visual, layout, and content needs.
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Do you need a website or blog based theme?
Some WordPress themes are designed to accommodate blogs and some are designed for full-blown websites. While you can take a theme designed for a website with a blog and convert it into a blog only site, it is difficult to do the opposite. Expecting that you can convert a blog theme into a professional company website is a step towards disappointment.
If you need a theme for a website, then search for WordPress themes that specifically say they are for business, corporate use, or a CMS.
What level of browser support do you require?
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Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetuer adipiscing elit, sed diam nonummy nibh euismod tincidunt ut laoreet dolore magna aliquam erat volutpat. Ut wisi enim ad minim veniam, quis nostrud exerci tation ullamcorper suscipit lobortis nisl ut aliquip ex ea commodo consequat.
The more browsers a developer supports, the more development and support time will be required. For this reason, we find older browsers, like IE5 or IE6, painful. Many theme developers will not support these older browsers due to the excessive levels or support and coding needed and their inability to support current design elements.
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If you need support for older browsers you need to make sure that your future theme is designed to accommodate such requirements. Before deciding what you need, know that requiring older browser support will limit your theme choices immensely.
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Do you need a fixed width or responsive theme?
Responsive design is another word for mobile friendly. While lots and lots of WordPress themes are now designed to be responsive, not all themes are responsive and you need to be clear on your mobile needs.
Our responsive themes will adapt to browser sizes based on popular devices like Androids, iPhones, and iPads. We code and test each WordPress theme to automatically resize to mobile devices at 240px, 320px, 480px, and 768px. We’ve picked these sizes because they are common devices and because they are what the major WordPress coders utilizes for responsive design testing. Some users will want additional support for lesser used mobile devices and this should be thought through and documented prior to searching for themes.
Before falling in love with any theme, make sure you’ve decided if responsive design is a requirement and if it is, determine what level of responsiveness is needed.