WordPress has so many themes to choose from. I am one of those people that has a hard time picking something off of a menu at a restaurant when there’s countless options and variations for items. However, I actually didn’t have a hard time finding a good theme to start working with. Two things that I kept in mind when considering a theme were simplicity and minimalism. If there’s too much going on with a theme, I’m going to get lost and confused and end up messing something up. The theme that I chose seemed to support the blog format while also allowing me to enable some dynamic features. Learning how to implement various aspects of a theme was valuable to me, as I have had some difficulties with this in the past (I’ve worked with WordPress in other courses before). I feel much more confident now working with WordPress Themes, and I also feel like I can put something together that actually looks kind of nice and maybe even a little professional. Picking out Widgets and customizing them was new to me, and it’s definitely something I am going to explore further within the WordPress environment. Expanding on my skills working with WordPress is important to me, and I learned some good stuff working with themes this time around. I often see in job listings for WordPress related positions that working with custom themes is an essential component for the job, so I feel good having taken the first step to learning another marketable skill in web development.
The official WordPress.com YouTube channel made this video to help users navigate and select themes on WordPress.com. However, the same principles apply to those of us not using WordPress.com to create and manage a WordPress powered website. I like this video because Mike Bal is a great communicator of WordPress topics.
And for anyone wondering what the difference is between WordPress.com and WordPress.org, here is an embedded discussion on the topic straight from the official WordPress subreddit. Reddit is one of my favorite resources for asking questions and finding the answer to very specific inquiries; it has this hivemind element amongst the vast number of communities and their users, and it makes finding answers to specific questions pertaining to niche topics easier than it should be sometimes. Remember back in the earlier days of the very first iPhone, when people could be hard parroting some catchphrase from some telecommunications company that was marketing the iPhone’s abundance of apps and its app market? “There’s an app for that!”, or, “I bet there’s an app for that!”; well, nowadays I like to think the same still applies, but has expanded to also be about subreddits. There is almost always a subreddit for any given topic. If you can imagine it, there’s probably a subreddit for it already in existence. Whenever I have a weird question about WordPress Themes, I visit the WordPressThemes subreddit! Below is a button that will redirect you to said subreddit. WordPress and all of its relegated topics are no different. Go check out /r/WordPressThemes, because any question you might have about themes has already been asked and answered there.
Ryan Laches is an aspiring web developer studying Web Development and Wake Technical Community College. Having spent most of his young adult life in the federal penal system, he hopes to inspire others in similar circumstances to turn to education as a way to break the cycle.
Congrats on a job well done with your site. Your article was informative and helpful. Keep up the good work!
thank you!
Hi Ryan! I really appreciate your reference to the subreddit for WordPress themes. I was just realizing how miserably unkempt my website seems to me, and how I’d like it to look. I realize that the theme I’ve chosen -albeit great with color scheme- is not ideal for making custom edits / adjustments. I will be checking out your valuable resource provided, thank you!
thank you!
Hey Ryan,
Great job on this post, its really informative and helpful when trying to find the ideal WordPress theme!
thank you!