The Advantages of Using Advanced Themes For Your Blog

Published on: Jan 4, 2010 @ 13:54

As soon as you go hunting for your first blog theme, you’ll quickly realize that there’s thousands of them — especially if you’re running a self-hosted blog.

Some of the themes are fabulous, but as you become a more experienced blogger, and your blog matures, you’ll become more discerning and demanding about a theme’s performance and power and eventually find yourself searching for themes based on function as well as appearance.

Eventually you’ll find yourself in the realm of the more advanced themes: magazine layouts, and structure-only themes where you have to determine for yourself the graphics, colour, fonts, and so forth.

Advanced Free Themes

You can still find free themes even at this advanced level of performance: Brandford Magazine theme is one such example. But at this level, and with a theme of this nature, in order to make it work properly, you will need to roll up your sleeves and pick away at raw PHP code. You will also need to follow the “Read This” installation file step by careful step, too.

The advantage of using these advanced themes is that fewer blog owners out there are using them than usual, because of the challenges involved in installing them.
Also, because of their tailorability, and their often highly professional look, they’ll give your blog a very different, unique look. You won’t look like a thousand other blogs out there.
And you won’t have to pay for it, either.

Advanced Premium Themes – Pre-Built

Your remaining two alternatives is to go the premium route, and either buy a theme that is exactly what you want, or have one made to your exact specifications.

Buying pre-built themes are a good middle-ground. There are themes out there that come with so many in-built options, and custom support that between the options, your small amount of scripting knowledge and the support staff, you will get very close to exactly what you want. For example, I went this route with my author blog just last week. I bought the premium theme frugal. [To be open and above-board, I admit that I have now become an affiliate of the theme owner -- but only because I'm so damned impressed with this theme. There are so many options and settings available via the dashboard that tinkering directly with the coding has - so far - not been needed at all]. This is a structure-only theme — everything else is added by you. The theme handles large amounts of information well.

The advantage of these premium themes is the same as the advanced free themes: Far, far fewer blogs are using them. The premium limits the distribution of the theme.
At the same time, the highly-tailorable quality of the themes means those blogs using the theme often are quite distinct from each other.
The functional quality of the themes means your blog’s structure can cope with the maturing content of your blog — which becomes more critical as time goes by.
You’ll have professional support and/or support forums.

Have Your Theme Designed

Themes designed to order can be moderate to very expensive indeed, depending on who your designer is, their reputation and how much they charge. You get what you pay for, too. If your designer is only charging $100 for exclusive rights, there’s a good chance the theme won’t be robust enough for your needs.

On the upside, you get exactly what you want, without having to lift a figure to touch any coding yourself, and full support, too.

The greatest advantage of having your own theme designed is that no one on the Internet will have your theme. It will be utterly unique and becomes your brand, which you can use for everything – banners, logos, email sig files, avatars, Facebook and so on.
If the theme has been well-built, it should be functional enough to cope with your blog as it matures, or your designer should be able to adjust the theme and structure to adapt to your building content (archive pages, etc.)
You should be guaranteed professional one-on-one support and attention as you need it.
You should never have to tinker with coding yourself.

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