How To Select A WordPress Template For Your Blog

Writing by Nick Stamoulis Tweet

You’ve decided that you want a company blog and that WordPress is the blogging platform for you. Good for you. You couldn’t have made a better choice. But be careful when choosing a template.

There are really two ways to go on a WordPress template. You can choose one of the many pre-designed templates that WordPress offers or find a designer to custom design you a WordPress template. Either way you have to be careful. Not all WordPress templates are created equal.

The problem with most templates, just like website templates, is that they are not designed with search engines in mind. I shouldn’t say “most.” What I mean is most that have problems … the problem is usually poor SEO quality. You’ll have to make sure you get a WordPress template that is easily crawled and provides your website with SEO benefits. Otherwise, you’ll be wasting your time blogging.

If you are going to use a custom designer then ask some basic questions like

• Do you build your templates with tables or CSS?
• Can you show me an example of a template you’ve designed that is crawled well?

Ask if you can see the code before you purchase a template. If a web designer won’t let you peak at the code then it probably isn’t worth much. A good web designer will keep the search engines in mind when designing your template. Ask if you can take it for a test drive and if the designer will give you a refund or redesign if you aren’t getting crawled. If not, then choose another designer.