Categories
Website development

Choosing a theme

One of the most important choices you make when developing a new website using WordPress is the theme that you use. There are two ways to go: choose a theme that’s pretty much like what you want the final site to look like, or choose one that’s easy to modify so you can get the site looking exactly the way you want. If you’ve got good CSS and php skills, of course.

This is the third site I’ve developed over the last few weeks. Each has a different purpose and a different audience, so I’ve used a different theme for each.

For the Newnham Associates website I used the default BuddyPress theme. I needed BuddyPress to provide the community functionality, and found it difficult to get any other theme working properly with it. And, to be honest, I wasn’t that fussy about exactly how the website looked, as long as it was reasonable.

For my brother’s business, we had a clear idea of what we needed. It was going to be important that the theme was reasonably easy to customize, so that we could keep as close as possible to his corporate identity. Thematic turned out to be a good choice, with reasonable documentation.

For this site, I want a theme that looks pretty good out of the box. I don’t anticipate a huge amount of customisation (but don’t place any bets…). So how could I resist a theme called Tarski? I like the look of it, and as an added bonus customisation looks reasonably easy.