Designers around the world create thousands of WordPress themes and, unfortunately, a lot of them are not very good. A designer can encounter a number of hurdles on his or her way to creating a great theme – the coding may be off, the functionality poor, or the design not all that impressive. Here are some tips that WordPress theme developers and designers must keep in the mind to make high-quality WordPress themes.
Start with a strong foundation
When designing a WordPress theme, you don’t need to reinvent the wheel. This holds especially true if you need to crank out designs on a regular basis – few designers have the desire or the time to create the same fundamental code time and time again.
Instead, start instead with a blank, or starter, theme that you can build on. Many are available online to designers, each with different features. By starting with a strong foundation like a starter theme, you can create and deploy designs quickly without skimping on quality.
Optimize with shorthand CSS
While some may want to form extended code that novices can then later tinker with for their personal use, advanced coders could benefit from coding with shorthand CSS. It keeps your spreadsheet shorter, cleaner, and can make your theme a bit faster, too.
Remove excess pages
The last thing you want to do is confuse readers, which is what tends to happen when too many pages are on your site. It makes navigation unnecessarily difficult – even well-structured blogs, for all their planning, can lose readers along the way if they have more pages than they really need. Review your design with a close eye and edit out unnecessary elements.
Cut out clutter with whitespace
Similarly to having an excess of pages integrated into the theme, an excess of text and images can easily overwhelm your visitor and make the content more difficult to read. High quality themes actively take advantage of space, opening up the page and displaying content in a way that is readily accessible and easy to read.
Rein in your color theme
It may be enticing to draw from countless shades across the spectrum for your design, but most of the time that is not a good idea – it winds up being simply too distracting. Most WordPress themes made up of fewer colors aesthetically come together best and, as an added bonus, appeal to a wide range of clients. Stick to a few colors at most, with a few related shades if you want additional variety. Sticking to a restrained color theme helps the focus stay on the site’s content, not its color selection.
Compare your theme between browsers and operating systems
People access websites from a multitude of technologies – laptops, desktops, mobiles, tablets, televisions, and more. That list is bound to increase as time moves on, too. For that reason, it is important to check that your theme looks professional and consistent throughout multiple configurations. Test your theme on multiple browsers to check that it passes the test on all of them. Plenty of websites offer services where you can complete this comparison step in a few second.
Do not join the ranks of designers who create WordPress themes that are not up to standard. While it can be tricky to create a stellar theme, it is not impossible – when usability needs, elegant code, and eye-catching design come together, the results can be exceptional. By following these tips, you can avoid some of the roadblocks that get in the way of creating a high quality WordPress theme.
Author Bio:
Guest post contributed by David Kendall on behalf of WhoIsHostingThis. David is a freelance technology writer. He enjoys sharing his insights on various tech blogs.