Free Themes vs Paid Themes WordPress
Alright welcome back video number 13. Okay so we’ve learned a ton in the first 12 video and we still have a reasonably boring blah looking website; so why is that? Well the key to prettiness is the theme and that is why when you go to appearance the first thing that you see themes and we’ve been using a very, very much not so much a blah theme but we really haven’t done anything with it, we really haven’t given it a real chance. So as you see WordPress as of right now is shipping with 2016 other say its 2015 and 2017 themes, so you get a few themes to start with but the vast majority of people will go and change the theme. So when it comes to themes a lot of people are inclined to go to Google and type in free WordPress themes. Get a website like this, now I just picked this one at random there are thousands of them trust me thousands of them. And this one just happens to be called 1000 free WordPress themes. Now I am not saying that what you’re looking at right now maybe bad or malicious however you need to know that you get what you pay for with a theme and if you pay nothing you may be getting a theme full of malware. Who knows what malware might be hiding on the theme, you might click something within the theme, it might take over your computer; you might click something on the theme and it might put out thousands of links to porn sites and sunglasses sites. And sites that you don’t know about and what happens if your website is linking out the porn sites and sun glasses sites? Well if you are a legitimate business and you are trying to do business over the web, your website might get black listed by Google. So bottom line do I not trust free things well i wouldn’t say that but if you’re going to get a free theme don’t do the Google search. Go to wordpress.org and look through the theme directory.
These at least have been vetted by WordPress, I’m not sure exactly what methodology WordPress uses to vet these things cuz there is a little button here that says upload your theme and it says that theme is reviewed by a review team. So you know that’s a good thing but if you’re going to go for a free theme, I would only go with a free theme from a source like this. As always I promise to share with you the secrets of what I’ve learned over years and years and years of working with WordPress and I will tell you that for small businesses when I to deploy websites my favorite guys to use our studiopress. Number one they are brilliant, number two the develop themes that are gorgeous, they develop themes that are coded extremely well, they developed themes that are great for search and one of my favorite things about studiopress is that they use child themes and what that means without getting into the technical s of it is every one of their themes has a parent theme and a child theme. And for those of us who like to make a lot of changes to the theme, we can make the changes to the child theme without messing up parent theme and then that way when they come out with an update the update are for the parent theme or the code for the theme can be updated without messing up our child theme. And they have a lot of things that I would consider are very clean and professional looking and you can go to I’ll include a link to studiopress so that you can see the themes and then once you get here you can click on the button for, up here shop for themes and you can look at the themes. The way you go about doing is if you just click on see details on pricing and then you can go to live demo, and you can see how clean and uncluttered and beautiful these themes are, great for small businesses. Now another company that I love that also uses the parent theme/ child theme methodology is another company called Web Savvy Marketing and I’ll include a link for them as well. Once you get to websavvymarketing.com, you can go up to the top and go to the theme store; what I love about these themes is they’re different from the studiopress themes in that they’re more vibrant and colorful, have more punch and they’re more fun very, very different from the studiopress themes at least in my opinion. And if we go and we click on live demo same thing and these guys also use the parent theme/child theme and you just kind of see how a little bit less stuffy and professional than the studiopress themes.
And another one that I would recommend is DIY themes, Thesis has been around forever although I don’t use it myself, I have a lot of developer friends who do and they speak very, very highly of it and take a look at that as a 4 option. So in short take themes very seriously don’t just willy-nilly download something because it’s free. Once again if you have a viable business and you want to be successful this is probably not a place that you want to skim and the vast majority of themes on the web that I’ve seen are under a hundred bucks so not a bad investment, you don’t want to end up with a theme that’s laden with malware that will either do damage to your personal computer or get you black listed with Google or any one of a thousand of the bad things that can happen with malware. I’m going to advocate going with one of these big theme companies that I know has a great reputation, that I know it’s been coded well you would be surprised as to what goes on in the coding behind-the-scenes things like page load speed and that sort of thing that is very, very important to your rankings and long-term. So don’t just pick a theme because it’s quick and free pick a theme that you find not only aesthetically pleasing but one that has been coded well and give you the flexibility to make changes if you see to it and support your future growth.
Alright!! In the next video we’re going to pick one of these themes and we are going to incorporate in our little WordPress website and we’re going to twick it. Hope to see you in the next video.
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