If you’re going to start a website for your business (and in this day and age, you should) you’re probably going to use WordPress to do it. WordPress is the most popular platform for creating websites, and there’s a reason for that: It’s easy to use, compatible across browsers, mobile-friendly, and fully customizable. You’ll have your choice of so many different themes and templates. But therein lies the problem. Which theme do you choose? This seems like an easy question to answer (“I’ll just choose the one that I like the most”) there’s actually more to it than that. What follows here is a discussion about the different things to keep in mind when choosing a WordPress theme for your business website, and tips on how to choose the right one for your brand.
One of the first things to keep in mind is how the template or theme speaks about your brand. If you have a financial services website, you’ll want to choose a more conservative theme than if your business is for face-painting and balloon animals, to use an extreme example. The template you choose should reflect the tone and general “feeling” of your business and industry. Why is this important? Because psychologically people will be drawn to certain aesthetics based on the type of business they are seeking to work with. For example, people seeking to hire a lawyer will probably be drawn more to clean lines, conservative colours, and a more sophisticated look to the website, whereas those seeking to find the right preschool for their child might expect to find bright colours, lots of photos of happy children, and a more upbeat website.
A lot of this is subliminal. It’s not as though people will go to a website and say to themselves “I will hire a lawyer if the website features grey and black, is organized and subdued, etc.” It’s more a matter of the kind of first impression that certain combinations of fonts, colours, and page design gives about a business.
A great place to start is by looking at your competition’s websites to find out what they are doing. Then, find a WordPress template that you can customize to give a similar look while still keeping your brand identity. At the very least, choose a template that will allow you to change the background, theme colours, and that will allow you to insert your logo and other identifying marks. For example, if you’re looking to start up a personal loan website, you should look at other loan websites to find out what they are doing, what works, and what doesn’t. Read More About This here.
It’s also smart to choose a template that doesn’t rely on lots of additional Javascript and CSS files. These files will slow down your computer quite significantly, which will compromise the user experience of the website, which could cost you customers. Moreover, if your website has a slow load time, you could find yourself penalized with Google. And you definitely don’t want that!
From a design standpoint, it’s critical that you choose a template that allows for breathing room. Otherwise, your website will seem visually cluttered. That will lead to visitors having difficulty navigating your website, which could spell disaster for your business. If a visitor can’t easily find the information he is looking for, there will be very little to stop him from navigating away from your site and toward that of your competitor. If you allow for some visual resting space in your design, your site will be much more visually appealing and more easily navigable.
When choosing with WordPress template to use, there are many things to take into consideration. It may seem like a trivial decision, but it’s actually a very important one. The template you choose says a lot about your business and will have a profound effect on your site visitors and their buying habits.