by Clay Mabbitt, SitePotion
Over the last year or two, I have more clients approach me about working on a website with the idea already in mind that they’d like to use a WordPress theme. For the
uninitiated, a WordPress theme is an already fleshed out design for a site that you buy and swap out your logo, copy, and images.
I certainly get the appeal. The demo versions of some of these themes are very attractive (often because they’re using amazing photos that may not be available for your own site). You cut the design costs substantially. Still with most themes being priced under $50 it seems like an amazing value. I think that price tag is what pulls people in, but the number can be a little misleading.
Most popular themes try to include all the bells and whistles that every potential website owner might want. No one site would use all of those modules, and you end up with a lot of moving parts you don’t need or understand. This makes the learning curve to understand how to put your own logo, copy, and images into the site much higher. Which brings up an important consideration: If the point of using a theme is that the coding is already done, why are people still reaching out to me (a programmer) when they want to use one? Why don’t they just install the theme and start putting in content themselves? It’s because with all the extra features and customization that theme developers have put in, the back end has become very difficult to use. A true layman usually can’t make sense of it.
Secondly, you undoubtedly are expecting to gain some business from your website. That means you will need someone to do the appropriate research for keywords, meta descriptions, etc. that optimize your site for searh engines. And you need content generated by someone who understands those search engine algorithms as well as updates content regularly and tweaks for the changes that come over time. All in all, it’s never going to be a $50 … or even $500 … proposition.
The other reasons a WordPress theme may cause some headaches:
- No easy button. Ironically the more “idiot-proof” a developer tries to make a theme, the more complex controls it ends up having. (I assume there are exceptions to this somewhere, but I’ve never seen one.)
- No such thing as an easy tweak. It might only be a few lines of code in a few places that need to change, but anyone you bring in needs to identify how many lines need to change and where. Ever try to read code someone else wrote? It can be an amazing time sink.
- Don’t forget the updates. Theme developers regularly make these down the road, and you can’t afford to ignore them
- Hacker magnet. Popular themes can be a convenient target for hackers because once they identify a vulnerability in the theme, they can target every site on the web that uses that theme.
I certainly won’t say that a custom theme is never a viable option for a website, but I will say that they never cost just $50.
