FREE or PREMIUM WordPress Theme: What you need to know before you waste your time and money

You can use a free theme or a premium theme (a theme that you purchase).

There are thousands of free WordPress themes to choose from and there are probably just as many if not more premium themes to choose from. Both kinds have their advantages and drawbacks, it depends on your needs now and in the future.

This article includes the pros and cons of free and premium themes, considerations to help you decide which type is best for your unique circumstances and recommends some of the more reputable free and premium WordPress themes.

**I am in the process of preparing a MASSIVE WORDPRESS THEME DIRECTORY that is broken down into niche markets.

For example, themes would work well for the New Age niche market.**

Pros of FREE WordPress themes

• They’re FREE!
• Thousands to choose from.
• You can try out many different kinds and use your learning experience to decide what you really like and dislike. Use this time to discover your preferences and create a shortlist of wants and don’t wants in an alternative free or premium theme.
• You can get a free theme and make modifications to it if you know some code. You can visit the WordPress codex site and spend time studying and learning for free so you can become your own WordPress designer. It takes longer but you will be self-sufficient.

Cons of FREE WordPress themes

• Many people are already using it and your site will look identical. You won’t have a unique site.
• You could spend weeks searching for a theme that meets your shortlist of wants and don’t wants and still not find something that you like. Meanwhile, you haven’t been spending as much time creating content or promoting your site.
• Many do not have widget areas, therefore you cannot use the fancy plugins available.
• You are stuck with the sidebars where they are. If the font is too small or the wrong font-family, bad luck. Don’t like the default header image? Background colour too dark, too blue, too bright, too pale? Live with it.
• WordPress is upgraded regularly and the free theme may not be upgraded by the designer. You may have to keep using the older version of WordPress, with all of its security weaknesses and give up using certain plugins that only work with an upgraded version of WordPress.
• No support. No upgrades. No instructions.

Pros of PREMIUM themes

• You can buy a theme that is exactly what you want or gives you the ability to make it exactly what you want.
• More care has been taken to make it work well, optimize the code so there are less errors and generally make the designer look like a true professional - because his reputation and bank balance depends on it.
• The designer is getting paid to maintain the theme, upgrade it when WordPress is upgraded and to add features or fix bugs when customers request them.
• If you don’t like it when you first start using it, you can often get a refund. Find out before you purchase it what the refund policy is. You may have only 14 or 30 days to get it working.
• There are often large communities of users who provide free support, ideas and free skins or child themes to show off their coding and design expertise. They will also develop galleries of examples to showcase how the theme can be customized to look absolutely unique.
• They will often support many more plugins and functions like sliders, slideshows and widgets that let you add amazing things to your content, sidebars, headers and footers without doing much more than checking a box or copying and pasting a few lines of code where you want the function to appear.
• Many popular features and plugins are built in already so you don’t have to do too much straight out of the box. Uploading your unique header image or background, changing the colour of your fonts and modifying the column widths, placements and appearances can often be done with a few clicks in the WordPress options dashboard area.
• Many premium WordPress themes have affiliate programs so that when somebody likes your site, clicks on your affiliate link in the footer and buys the theme for their own site, you make an affiliate commission of $15 to $100. You can easily earn back the purchase price of your theme just by adding a link in your footer.
• By using a premium theme for your site, you can promote the theme by writing articles about it – as well as adding an affiliate link to your footer – and make lots more money as an affiliate who actually uses and loves the theme.
• You can show off your coding and design skills with the theme and sell your services as a designer or tweaker for a particular theme. There are web designers who offer customizations just for the Thesis Theme for example. Thesis users search for them.
• When you use the same premium theme on multiple sites (that is you have a developer’s licence) you can make changes across all of your sites by simply copying and pasting and using your learnings and experience with the theme to make all of your sites unique. Less time, less money, greater efficiencies and consistent looks (if that is what you want).

Cons of PREMIUM themes

• You might spend money on a theme only to find out that it doesn’t do what you want it to do or doesn’t have the look you were hoping for. If you can’t get a refund, you need to try and sell it or just keep it on your computer for another project (aka collect cob webs).
• You might pay a lot for a theme only to find out that you could have gotten a similar theme for a lot less or could have got a refund by purchasing something else, using a discount code, buying it from somewhere else, etc. Do your research.
• If you want to use it on more than one site, you might have to pay a lot more to get the developers licence. Sometimes it is cheaper to use it on multiple sites with multiple personal licences. Think carefully about your future needs. Some developer’s licences are very expensive and sometimes they are quite reasonable.
  • For less than double the cost of a personal licence you can currently buy a developer’s licence for Thesis Theme and use it on as manyof your own sites as you want.

Considerations

Some themes offer many different functionalities while others don’t offer many options at all. You may or may not be able to add functionality or make changes to the appearance of your theme. So, make sure you are happy with a theme before you spend hours and hours trying to make it work.

If you have to change your theme again, you will need to spend many more hours and perhaps more money buying another theme. This is time you could be spending on creating content or promoting your site.

That’s why I love Thesis Theme. You can do nearly anything with it – it is that flexible. Check out the Thesis Gallery to see just how different you can make your site by just using the Thesis Theme framework and making changes to only 2 files – with the help of hundreds of free tutorials, including those on this site.

You may or may not be able to easily alter your theme’s appearance. Some themes are great for newbies with little or no coding knowledge, while others can have quite a learning curve. Others are quite difficult to work out, don’t offer much assistance, don’t offer upgrades or support and don’t come with instructions that the ordinary person can make sense of. Too bad if you can’t get your money back or you spend way too many hours trying to figure out before aborting the theme all together.

Here are some things to think about, when deciding what you want your site to look like:

• Columns - how many columns – 1, 2, 3, 4 or more? If you have multiple columns – how many will be sidebars?
• Sidebars - where do you want your sidebars – one left and one right, all left or right?
• Header - the default header with the header text over the top? A unique header or just a unique header background image or colour?
• Navigation - one or multiple menus or none? Drop down menu or vertical menu on the side, or both? Breadcrumbs?
• Footer - basic links or fat footer with columns and lots of extras? Widgets in your footer?
• Widgets - extra functions in your sidebar and footer? Which plugins to use for your widget areas?
• Style - simple, complex, magazine, minimalist, bright, plain, business, personal, light or dark?
• Advertising - areas for ad blocks, Google AdSense?
• Images - rotating images, slideshows, featured post slider, large or small, automatic resizing and thumbnails?
• Home page - static or blog style?
• Background - default, your own image and/or colour choices?
• Font and text - style, font colour, size, family, line height, spacing?
• Blog or website - you can use a WordPress theme to make your site look like  a traditional html website, it’s all in the template. If you want a blog style you will have, for example, dates, recent posts, 2-3 columns, an always changing front page. If you want a home page like a traditional website, you will have lots of links to other parts of your site, including a blog and it will change less frequently. You may have more or less content on your home page than other pages of your site.

Options

A few ideas to help get you started:

1. Start your blog with a free theme and get your content up as soon as you can. The design of your site is a second priority. When you have your main pages and say 5 to 10 articles published you then have enough content to satisfy the search engines as to what your site is all about. Then, start playing with the look of your site.

2. Add several different free themes to your WordPress site, say 2 to 6. Use each for a several days or weeks and see what you like and dislike about each one. See how easy they are to change the look and functionality of. Is it easy to add a unique header or change the background colour for example? Decide what is important to you and shortlist your requirements. This will help you decide if you need to upgrade to a premium theme that usually offers you more flexibility.

3. Find a premium theme that you love and find other sites using it. If you fall in love at first site – buy it and try it. Make sure you try the demo and ask the developer as many questions as you want before buying it. Does the premium theme site have a support forum? Is the support forum full of complaints, unresolved questions and requests for features that you thought it should already have? If you can’t get a look at the support forum, Google for the “theme name+review” and see what other people are saying about it?

4. Use a free theme and pay a designer to make changes for you or …

5. Buy a premium theme and ask a designer to make changes for you.

• Designers (and other people who make changes to WordPress themes) may specialise in particular themes like Thesis for example.
• Theme specialists can usually do the work more quickly and cheaply than others and can provide examples of their work.
• Check out their portfolio pages or ask them for examples.
• Talk to the owners of those sites and ask for their opinions on the work of the designer, how much they paid, whether they were happy with their work, what lessons they learned that they are willing to share…

6. Buy a premium theme and purchase or download a free ‘skin’ or ‘child theme’. These are basically customizations or modifications of themes so they no longer look like their default. Check out a sample of free Thesis skins.

7. Buy a solid, flexible premium theme with a great support community, lifetime upgrades and gradually make changes to the look of your site by learning a little bit of code here and there.

• I bought Thesis Theme and knew nothing about code when I started. I bought myself a book, read lots of tutorials and worked out how other great looking sites did things and tailored it to my own needs.
• I now know quite a bit so I can design unique sites using Thesis without paying anybody a cent. No designer, more money for me. Great support, if I get stuck I just ask for help and somebody usually volunteers the answer in the forum or on other Thesis sites.

Recommended sites – FREE WordPress Themes

There are so many out there. These are some I have discovered listed in no particular order…

• Official WordPress free Themes Directory
• Theme Studio
• Theme Lab
• WPThemes 360
• WordPress Themes Base
• Top WP Themes
• Smashing Magazine List of 83 Beautiful WordPress Themes
• WP Themes Free

Recommended sites – PREMIUM WordPress Themes

Again, lots to choose from, but here are some of my favourite sites…

Thesis Theme – of course. This is the WordPress theme I use for most of my sites.

Check out Thesis Gallery to see screenshots of hundreds of unqiue Thesis sites. You can tweak your Thesis Theme for WordPress to create a totally unique site. There are no limits to your imagination.

• Theme Forest
• Gorilla Themes
• StudioPress
• iThemes
• Woo Themes
• WordPress Remix
• Templatic Premium Themes