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Introduction
to WordPress, Part 2: Themes By James Martell
In this second installment, I'd like to talk about WordPress themes, a great feature that makes it extremely easy, even for novices, to build a very professional looking website. But it wasn't always that way. In the early days when I was getting started online, I, like many other website owners relied on Microsoft FrontPage to create and maintain my websites. They were very basic, but were right for the times. Eventually the graphic designers started to catch on and begin to develop FrontPage themes to replace the ones that came included with FrontPage. I would purchase these low-cost templates to give the site a professional feel.
Now that I work with WordPress, I have no use for FrontPage templates. WordPress offers a variety of designs called themes that work in the same way as the templates worked with FrontPage. Using one of hundreds of themes, I can create a great-looking website for a fraction of the cost of a custom site. Best of all, the themes are designed to work with WordPress’ powerful and robust content management system. If you’re not familiar with the system, you may want to read through the first article in this series, Introduction to WordPress. The WordPress themes range in price from $0 to $79 (yes, there are free designs available) and can be found on the WordPress.org website. To give your website an added boost, you can choose from a few premium themes with extra features and more functionality. For example, the following sites were created using premium WordPress themes:
You will notice that all of these websites look professional and show no signs of a template – an important component of a great-looking site. Each of them are powered by WordPress, keeping a good $1,000 to $2,000 in my wallet while providing me with an exclusive design. While I do have a few favorites that change regularly, personally I am quite partial to the WPRemix theme because it offers over 50 page layouts.
Artisteer Members of my SUPER BootCamp use these themes to create beautiful sites that work in tune with their affiliate programs and Google AdSense – but that’s a story for another day. Stay tuned for the next edition of the newsletter, where I'll talk about WordPress plugins and how they can be used to add functionality to your website for free! Happy blogging! All the best,
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In
the last edition, I published the
I’d
then hire the graphic designer to develop a professional
header for the site, which would run me about $100.
It seemed like the perfect solution at the time because
it saved me about $1,000 to $1,500 that I would have
otherwise spent on a custom design.
