Hello everyone, this time I want to share with you things I can consider very important to review before purchasing Blogger or Wordpress theme.
Before I started offering designs, I was just blogging and I was buying themes from someone. Now, I do offer this type of services and I discuss template looks with many people and I just thought it would be great to highlight important things to check when purchasing a template.
These advises are important if you want to grow your blog and be found in search engines. You don't really need to worry about some of them if you blog for yourself and are not really thinking of growing your site.
I hope you will find my tips useful.
Readers, let me know what things you consider/look for when purchasing a theme. I am curious to find out!
Of course, there are many other things to consider when purchasing the theme but I wanted to highlight the ones I noticed disappoint very often.
1. MAKE SURE YOUR TEMPLATE IS RESPONSIVE - LOOKS GOOD ON MOBILE.
Earlier this year, Google announced that how your site looks on mobile will have an impact on how high you will rank in search results. Google algorithm does not only take your site being responsive or not into consideration, they also consider DA (Domain Authority), key words, social media sharing etc. This change came into effect on 21st April 2015. To check if your site is responsive, you can use this page: MOBILE FRIENDLY TEST (CLICK). If you are about to purchase a theme, you can use demo link to see if the template will be responsive.
2. MAKE SURE THE TEMPLATE WILL HELP YOU ACHIEVE YOUR GOALS.
There are hundreds of different bloggers out there with different goals. For example, if you are an aspiring photographer, you will want people to Pin/Share your work, if you create any other type of art, you will also want people to share so you can be easily found on sites such as Pinterest. If you are, however, a blogger like me, reviewing things, talking a little bit about lifestyle (cool places to visit, some recipes occasionally), you will want people to sign up to your site so they regularly come back to see what you reviewed. You will also want to be found in search results when others search for product review. Don't get me wrong, all of us will want people to sign up, people to share images on Pinterest but there are some bloggers that will focus on some things more, and on some of them less.
3. MAKE SURE THE THEME IS PERFECT FOR THE TYPE OF BLOGGER YOU ARE.
Again, if you are a photography blogger, you will, probably, want to display big images, have a gallery etc. If you are a fashion blogger constantly featuring new trends, you might want to consider newspaper-like theme. For example, I blog about different topics - beauty, fashion, recipes and blogging help and I want my readers to see all type of articles on home page that's why I decided to go for this magazine-like style.
4. NEVER (!) RELAY ON DEMO.
Almost every single template available out there has a live preview. When viewing this, try to imaging your own posts over there. When I create a demo/live preview, I ALWAYS try to match images from posts to the theme, so for black & white theme, I would add black and white photography or something with grey shades. When I was creating this cute pink template, I added images with neutral shades so it would look good. Many people purchase templates after blogging for a while so they already have around 50 - 100 posts published - that's why, again, it is important you imagine your posts and images with the theme.
5. 'READ MORE' OPTIONS.
I see this with MANYYYYY templates - this is something very similar to 'Never relay on demo' thing. I see lots of demos having very short posts - literally 4 lines and featured image - so the home page looks really nice and clean with around 4 posts displayed but which blogger writes 4 lines long post? If you see something like this in demo, make sure you ask the seller if the theme comes with 'read more' option that appears automatically (!) without you going back to every single post and inserting it manually.
6. IMPROVING BOUNCE RATE = INCREASING PAGE VIEWS.
Double check if the theme has some widgets/space for widgets that would increase page views - for example: Related Posts under each post or 'You might also like' suggestion. I have learnt that widgets in sidebar, such as 'Most popular' or 'Most commented' are encouraging too - make sure this widgets are visible, for example, I personally prefer small image and post title so the reader can have an idea what the post is about.
0 comments:
Post a Comment