Tips for Designers Before Design New Themes

What is the mission statement for your theme?

wordpress-theme-designSelecting the type of content that your theme will focus on is no superficial decision; it will play a significant role in the design decisions you make, and the features you choose to include. For the most part, you can let your content do the work for you. Planning a set of features to complement your content is as easy as letting that content shine. There is an extensive variety of content types available, with an even larger number of hybrids that exist. Using the four sample mission statements we outlined in the last section, here are the content types each one will primarily serve:

The Blog Theme

The classic blog archetype that WordPress was modeled on is built around text content that’s frequently updated. Visitors to this type of site want to access the content that they’re after easily. This could be articles, tutorials, journals, reviews, or any other form that primarily uses
text to communicate. Authors will pick a text-based theme because it makes it easy to publish their writing, and because it makes it easy for their readers to find the content they’re looking for.

With this theme, the typography itself becomes a key feature: big, juicy, readable text is more than a luxury—it’s essential to the theme’s success in meeting the demands of its viewers. Text driven themes often carry a lot of blog posts as well, so it would be worth considering various methods that allow users to find relevant content.
Here are some good free blog wordpress themes you can find for you blog.

The Image-centric Theme

Photographers, design studios, illustrators, and image-rich magazines are just some of the types of businesses that want to publish content that’s centered around images. Visitors are likely to come to these sites for large, attractive images, and for the tools that make it easy to browse these images. Authors will generally pick a theme that caters towards this kind of content, giving images a lot of prominence in the layout. An image-centric theme needs to consider the size of the main content column, as this determines the maximum width of images. It’s also important to contemplate image-relevant features such as a lightbox, an image gallery template, custom thumbnails, and an image slider on the front page.
Here are some quality photography wordpress themes for you to choose from.

The Video Site Theme

Video is an increasingly popular medium for delivering content on the Web. In many ways, the design goals and constraints of a video theme will be similar to those of an image-centric theme, though you’ll have the benefit of a more consistent content size and shape to design for. Your typical site visitor will appreciate the ability to share videos easily with their friends, and publishers seek easy support for a number of popular embedded video players. The video blog will need a customized layout and feature set to suit the needs of the video content. The layout must make the activity of watching the videos as easy as possible. Give some thought to where the video player (or players) will be located in the layout. Allowing visitors the ability to easily browse for similar videos would be a great feature. Social media sharing links should be easy to access as well, so that visitors can share the videos with their
friends directly.
More than 10 free and premium video wordpress themes.

The Business Site Theme

Though initially developed as a blogging platform, WordPress is also very well-suited to being used as a content management system for a business or other promotional website. As businesses recognize the importance of integrating powerful content management and social media tools into their websites, this type of WordPress-based site will only become more prevalent. Content on this kind of site will include About and Contact pages, though there should also be good support for blog or news content.When it comes to this form of theme, ease of customization and branding is crucial, as the company will want to ensure the site reflects its professional identity. Key features often include highly customizable colors, space reserved for a bold mission statement on the home page, and plenty of ways to organize a firm’s core business content into a form that more closely resembles a printed brochure than your standard text blog.
Here are more than 80 professional business wordpress themes.
Of course, most customers will be looking to publish a mix of content types. For example, a small photography studio might be looking for a theme that makes it simple to create attractive static pages, in addition to the features common to image-centric themes, like galleries or sliders. Bloggers usually want the ability to easily include images or videos in their posts, while many businesses want to have blog content on their sites. Given these variations, having a good idea of the primary content type your theme aims to deliver will enable you to give such content particular prominence, and make your job easier when selecting features for your theme. In each of these four examples, the key point to remember is that we’re letting the content do the planning for us. You can always add or remove features based on your unique take on the archetype later on. At this point in the planning process, you should start by creating a bare-bones list of features that are essential to the content type and mission statement.