The Problem with WordPress templates

I love to look at website templates from different designers!  They are always so inspiring! New-fangled sliders and switches, fancy beautiful graphics, and no shortage of 3D- animated cartoon shots to serve as placeholders for pictures.  They always LOOK GREAT!

In the store window, they look great, that is.  Once you make the purchase, bring it home and unwrap the fancy template from its shiny cellophane, the experience can be a little deflating.  Why do I say such a thing?  Let me take you through the below example:

This magazine style template is awesome!  It is awesome for a very well established news site – most sites that I design however, are not.

Many of my clients are new ventures- or they are new to the concept of continuously deployed content targeted for inbound marketing, or content marketing.

So with this example home page to look how you want it, you need to bring:

• Impressive Social Media followers
• Outstanding Graphics that look like they are out of a comic book
• A comment feed that looks fresh
• Post titles with Words that have few syllables
• Post titles with few words

The pictures, the followers, all things that we can fake or replace.  The biggest problem here, however, is the space allotted for Blog Post Titles.  I am a firm believer in having well articulated blog post headers and titles- an important part of search engine marketing.

Take Away

When I design a website, or, rather, when I first meet with a client, I try to understand their position, their ability to write, and their ability to find new imagery for their pages and articles.  Do please judge yourself before you run down the path of a template that may leave you hanging out to dry!