Choosing a Theme for your WordPress Blog
Well – it’s actually pretty easy!
When I started creating websites I always used free themes. Simply because they were free! And there are bazillions of free themes out there! The supply is endless. The only catch is that free themes very often have a link at the bottom to the designer’s website.
A link to the designer’s website doesn’t actually hurt your site. But with Google’s newest updates the designer doesn’t really get much from it anymore.
These themes are often designed in a way that demands you to keep the link, but it doesn’t matter because it doesn’t hurt your blog at all.
Free themes are often simpler versions of a professional theme, but in most cases, you can easily start out with a free theme. Simply go to Google and type: Free WordPress Themes.
Paid WordPress themes.
At some point, I wanted more. So I started buying themes at Themeforest/Envato. They have thousands of themes and they are often very beautiful. The downside is they have to compete on functionality so when you buy a theme you get a ton of functionality you will never use.
But there is another problem.
I experienced time after time that these theme designers used third-party plugins and modules and eventually some of them went out of business and left the theme in ruins. And there is nothing to do about it. Besides, you have to BUY updates on a regular basis and it isn’t always easy to update these themes. You really need some tech skills as the process is never automated.
But the worst thing about buying thems on Themeforest is that half the theme I ever bought on ThemeForest has disappeared and there is NO update available anymore! This is an error message I have to eat every time I log in to Theme Forest:
Download not available
Item removed by either staff or the author
Nice! Right?
So I decided to stop using paid themes. They became too expensive and they demanded too much of my attention and work.
Free WordPress Themes
If you want to start out with as few expenses as possible you should got for themes from the WordPress repository. You will wind this when you log into your WordPress site and click Appearance/Themes from the Admin menu to the left.
You can find a lot of great themes here. I used to find themes this way and one theme I liked in particular is ASHE. You can see a demo on ASHE here: The Million Dollar Guru Blog. I have used that a lot! It is fast, simple and stable!
The one Theme I would recommend is DIVI
Before jumping on the DIVI wagon I tried the Thesis template which was great. But it is ONLY for people who understand CSS and HTML. It is NOT a theme you should buy. I did it because it was the best SEO theme at the time.
One day I sat down and decided the time had come to find something new that worked great. So I compared Elementor, Genesis, and DIVI. They are all great frameworks.
Elementor is very complicated and you will probably hate it. But there are pretty much no limits to what you can do. It is for tech-savvy people. Genesis (with the Mai theme) is simple and fast. You can’t do fancy things but it works fine with WordPress and Gutenberg and you can make a blog. Here are a few examples:
Mai Theme for Genesis Showcase Archive » BizBudding Inc.
Behandlernettet – Markedsføring for behandlere
But what really got my attention was DIVI. It is cheap. You can do pretty much everything you can imagine. And best of all – they have pretty damn good chat support! You need to take some time to learn DIVI though.
I actually make money on selling the DIVI theme and so can you! You get 50% of the sales price for every license you sell! If you want to buy it go here: Buy DIVI Theme
As soon as you have bought it you can become an affiliate!
With DIVI you can do anything. DIVI comes with a ton of templates and if you want to make it easy for your self simply chose one of the templates that suit you and start from there. It took me only a few hours to create my first simple website with DIVI and it took a week to get to know DIVI.
If you have a problem then use google! There are so many great DIVI help videos out there.
Or even better – Chat with DIVI support. They are fantastic!
Nice! I already bought DIVI some months ago. Had to invest a week in teaching myself how to use it, but I am very happy with DIVI.