What Makes A Great Wordpress Theme?
I have recently dedicated a few hours of my time having a look at other people’s Wordpress themes, and it does amaze me how many themes out there may look good but the designers/developers just haven’t spent the time to make sure it ends up as a great theme.
What do I constitute as a great theme? Well, for me an ideal Wordpress theme will meet the following criteria:
Produce valid XHTML and CSS
So many themes seem to fail at this first hurdle. It’s not difficult to do - it just requires attention to detail. If a block of code isn’t validating against the W3 validator then simply Google for the answer. There are also a lot of good forums and groups out there with people who are capable and willing to help. There really isn’t any excuse for invalid XHTML and CSS.
Consider child pages
This is another gripe I have about many of the themes available is that the authors haven’t considered that some people may use child pages on their website. Not everyone is going to use Wordpress purely as a blogging application - it can also easily be used as a Content Management System. For example: someone has a website with an About page, they would also like to include a child page called Staff and another called History. With many of the themes I’ve tested the links to child pages simply aren’t available - people only cater for top-level pages, and that’s simply not acceptable.
Admin panel
Now this is something that you rarely see in a Wordpress theme, and that’s easy access to the main administration links in the admin area. This is something I included in the Web2.0* theme quite early on and it does make administrating the website a lot easier.
If you do have any thoughts on how I could improve the theme even more then please do feel free to leave your ideas in the comments area.
This entry was posted on Saturday, January 12th, 2008 at 8:39 am and is filed under General. Find similar posts by selecting any of the following tags: advice, child pages, theme, valid css, valid xhtml, wordpress. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
on January 31, 2008 at 8:57 am Lucy wrote:
Web2.0 is my fav WP theme.
on January 31, 2008 at 7:40 pm Neil Merton wrote:
Hi Lucy,
I’m you like the theme!
on February 15, 2008 at 7:32 pm arejae wrote:
Hi neil, i like your web2.0 theme too. have use your theme quite long time ago. :)
thanks.
on February 26, 2008 at 12:07 am dupola wrote:
I learned a lots form your Web 2.0 theme.
on March 6, 2008 at 5:09 pm Jayvee wrote:
Is there anyway though that you can integrate Gravatars, image headers and comment quoter plugins to your theme? It already looks great.
on April 4, 2008 at 6:42 am Lucy wrote:
I have the same question as Jayvee.