As a Web Designer, I have the opportunity to play with different themes and their features. During the past month I’ve tested and edited some blog themes for my clients and personal projects and I’d love to share my experience and thoughts with you!
September Favourites – Blog Themes
I am exited to start this new blog series where I’m going to talk about some of my month favourites. In this post I will talk about WordPress themes for Bloggers.
3 factors I keep in mind when choosing a theme for my clients are:
- Responsiveness. A theme must be responsive, that means it looks and works perfectly on every device (laptop, tablet, smartphone). If you don’t invest on that, you’re cutting out a lot of potential customers.
- User friendly. This can be related to the first factors and you want to make sure that users can navigate your blog easily and smoothly. If a user have to visit tons of other pages before getting where he/she wants, is more likely that he/she will leave your website.Ā
(Interested in knowing how users behave on your blog? Read my guide – Google Analytics for Beginners) - Cost. Depending on your budget, you want to make the most out of blog themes. If you’re going to pay a couple of bucks more, you want to make sure you get what you’ve paid for.
Let’s get started š
Bluebird
Clean and minimalistic, BluebirdĀ theme will guide your users to focus on your blog’s content.Ā
The sticky Social Icons on top of the page are great to easily connect with users and make it fast to find you on social media.
You can show a short biography on the sidebar of the blog to show users who you are and what you do. Short & sweet!
As default, the theme shows title and meta dataĀ on the homepage, as well as sharing buttons at the bottom of the post.Ā
A great feature isĀ categories and recentĀ in the sidebar toĀ helps users navigating easily and discover new posts they might be interested in.
Most noteworthy, the theme only costs $19. Great for first time bloggers due to all the basic feature it includes.
Ella Sophia
Modern and feminine, Ella Sophia is my #1 favourite for September.
Not by chance it is a child theme from my favourite Genesis Framework I’ve already shortlisted in one of my previous post here.
Simple but effective, the layout shows the Social Icons on the top right corner and the Social Widgets on the sidebar as well.
The Navigation Menu, in Montserrat font, is beautifully boxed in a soft pink colour.
On the sidebar you can easily show Social Media Widgets like Twitter, Pinterest and Facebook, and also a product preview very useful if you are an influencer blogger.
Instinct
Instinct is the perfect theme for blogging and showing a portfolio.
It offers different pages layout to just display things as you want to. For example, full width, right or left sidebar and much more.Ā
The best feature is the unlimited colours schemes so you can change colour to almost every element that you see.
Furthermore the theme includes customer widgets, alongside with WordPress standard ones. About, Instagram widget, and a greatly improved latest posts widget are just an example.
Emily Belle
Emily Belle is the theme to for if you are looking for a simple but feminine theme for your blog.
Fully responsive and built on Genesis Framework, is probably the best choice for aĀ simple yet stylist online presence.
A very recommend features is the email list integration, very helpful for building your email list quickly.
Another great feature is the colour customiser to changeĀ body text colour, link colours, site name/description, widget title, post title colours.
Above all, the price makes it very accessible also to first time bloggers. Just $19 onĀ CreativeMarket.com.
Little Story
Last but not least, I want to include this “out of the blue” theme in my September Favourite.
Colourful and textured, the theme supportsĀ featured images, several post formats and social networking options.
Furthermore, the themeĀ supports Aside, Image, Video, Quote, Link, Gallery, and Status post formats.
Also, you can choose between full-width layout, sidebar and three footer sidebar so you can customise the theme to how you need.
These are my September favourite. Have you tried some or have other theme suggestion? Let me know in the comment below.Ā
So many gorgeous themes to choose from – I think Ella Sophia is my favourite too! Iāve been thinking about a new theme for my blog and I know itāll be so hard to choose one!
Same š every month I’d like to change the website theme but there are so many that I cannot decide!