Website Theme or not to Theme?
Should you use a website Theme for your Magento, WordPress, Shopify, Squarespace website? It does pose a question.
These days as Websites advance in every direction from their capabilities to their technologies to their conformity, we seeing two distinct trends, the first is a growing up of the industry, from being an experimental thing to a functional, mass-market effects are causing best practices to exist which is leading to a lot of recognisable traits on a website.
And secondly, costs, to make something remarkable is still very easily done, but you do need a decent sized wallet.
We, here at NCompass, sometimes feel like we’re jack of all trades and master of none, but that’s actually not true, we can build anything, we can brainstorm, have the imagination, can design pretty much anything, and then make it al work… trouble is – some of it is complicated and that comes with a modern-day price tag. But we can do it.
Back to website Themes, this post is aimed at people that don’t want to break the bank, understand that their website has to do a job and need a website to show off their business as quickly and efficiently as possible. A Theme is often the answer.
There are some drawbacks though and these need consideration:
- They look good… all too often once you have picked your Theme you realise quite quickly that their photos are better than yours. That swish receptionist looks better than your front door. So when picking any Theme you need to have a clear view of how it might translate for you.
- Themes are difficult to customise… You love the layout and the colour scheme, the Theme is perfect, if only you could change the menu. You can’t – well actually you can at a price – but customising a Theme to your specific requirements is definitely challenging. The key is ‘don’t’ – live with it and your life will be a lot simply both now and in the future, the more you break away from the Theme the bigger the potential whole you will build for yourself.
- The Admin… you do need to select carefully… If you ever want to change the website in the future without re-writing everything, Many Themes have their own way of displaying your content… a Picture is set to the right, or text is surrounded by code. Basically, what will it look like if you apply another Theme, the likelihood is a disaster. Therefore pick a Theme that promises to use default Admin functionality… Anything else and it will be difficult to deal with in the future.
- SEO… there’s no point in having a website if people never see it and these days that means you need to be found on Google. If the Theme you have chosen looks amazing and does something amazing, make sure the code is written on adheres to the rules for Google. You need a website that has Semantic Code underneath and does not take more than 3 seconds to load at the absolute top.
Overwhelmingly our advice to you, when choosing to Theme or not to Theme, is that if you do decide on a Theme, chose wisely and for the long term and then stick to it. Don’t customise a Theme, don’t break a great design… instead go with it, fit in, gt decent photos that fit the existing Photos. Choosing to use a Theme means working with it, not fighting against it.