WordPress themes provide templated front-end styling for websites. Instead of building a website’s look and feel, page layout and other features in code, themes provide a convenient head start, and most can be customized such that the site will not look like other site’s with the same theme. Themes have taken much of the development time and headache out of creating a site architecture that once-upon-a-time had to be coded manually.
If you’re thinking about building a new website or redesigning an existing site, read, When is a New Website Worth the Cost?
There are thousands of WordPress themes available from multiple suppliers, including the WordPress community. Every theme will have its strengths and weaknesses. We’ve found that the best themes are the ones that offer the most flexibility and options for your business. For example, you may not need ecommerce when you first build your site, but maybe you will need it later. It will be important that your theme can support ecommerce as an option.
Color Lib
Color Lib offers a family of WordPress business themes, with many them listed by the types of businesses the theme is designed to support. For example, “Construction Company,” and “Fitness and Gym,” and “Church.” This helps you quickly find a theme that is likely to have built-in features that most businesses like yours use. For example, the Fitness and Gym theme has built-in features for the gym’s schedule, trainer profiles, and popular classes.
Element Themes
Other theme builders emphasize the tools that they provide. Element Themes focuses on the ease of use and drag-and-drop site building features available in all of its themes. Elegant Themes’ flagship theme, Divi claims to be able to “Build anything. Drag and drop. No coding required.” The theme has been so popular that Elegant Themes packaged its capabilities into a plugin that can be applied to any of the company’s themes. The company’s goal is to provide “the best visual builder in the world.” Extensive SEO capabilities, striking portfolio pages for showcasing products and much more under the hood also make Divi what one reviewer called “the most reliable theme for creating successful business websites today.”
ThemeForest Marketplace
ThemeForest is an online marketplace for products for creatives. At ThemeForest, you can buy and sell HTML templates as well as themes for popular CMS products like WordPress, Joomla and Drupal. Themes are priced by the complexity of theme, quality and use of the file; the total price also includes a Buyer Fee. ThemeForest offers some 10,000 business themes for as little as $3. As with Color Lib, you can search by the type of business you are starting to find a theme that is likely to have much of what you need ready to use. One of our favorites themes from ThemeForest is Salient by ThemeNectar. Salient is visually stunning and extremely flexible with some 500 shortcodes, 800 fonts, multiple e-commerce integrations, and a custom Visual Composer integration that makes building pages fast and easy.
Uncode
Uncode (by Undsgn) takes a different approach and provides one theme with many, many pre-built customizations to choose from. For example, you can choose from dozens of home page designs, e-commerce page designs and functionality, blog layouts, headers, contact pages and more. You basically build your own theme from within the Uncode theme. There are modules for specific types of businesses like restaurants, creative agencies, as well as modules for functions like help desks and photo galleries. As the name suggests, minimal coding is required.
